The Trapdoor
by avesjohn
Summary: Claire is staying at her Aunt Sophia's house for a week, and her cousin Lily has discovered a trapdoor in their cellar floor leading to new locations every time they go down. But Lily and Claire may have underestimated the magic at work....
1. Chapter 1

_Wednesday, July 14, 2004_

"Happy Fourth of July!" my cousin Lily said as we shared a hug. It'd been years since I'd last seen my relatives in Norfolk: my Mom's older brother Bruce, his wife Sophia, and their fifteen-year-old daughter Lily. Uncle Bruce wasn't actually there to greet me—he was on tour somewhere in the Atlantic—but the women in the family were here, and that was enough for me. "I know I'm a little late," Lily smiled.

"How was your flight, Claire?" Aunt Sophia asked.

"Okay," I replied, adjusting my green carry-on backpack to relieve the stress on my shoulders. "So are we going to head out, or what?"

"Sure." Aunt Sophia nodded and began leading Lily and I to the baggage claim, where my suitcase would be arriving shortly. Except for my green eyes (compared to their blue), the three of us were very alike, especially today, dressed in shades of blue (lighter for Lily than my aunt and I) with ponytails formed in our brunette hair. "I heard you graduated from elementary school last month. Excited about becoming a middle schooler?"

"Excited," I agreed reluctantly. "Nervous. It's seventh grade, Aunt Sophia, it's not like I'm going away to college."

"Yeah," Lily said. "But I think what my Mom means is, this is like you're entering the minor leagues. High school being the major. You're on your way, Claire." It was good to know they still remembered who I was—a baseball fan. But the conspicuous blue-and-white Dodgers T-shirt I was wearing may have been something of a hint if they _had_ forgotten.

"She's twelve," Aunt Sophia reminded Lily. "It's puberty. Middle school for her means boys. That's what it meant for you, kid."

"Lily looks like Jennifer Love Hewitt," I said. "Of course it was going to mean boys for her."

"Hey, I have smaller boobs than she does," Lily was quick to point out.

"I wasn't insulting you."

"Yeah, I know, but if a boy starts comparing me to some hot celebrity, then it's obvious he's thinking about _her_ and not _me_. Fortunately, I have better things to occupy my time than the opposite sex."

"Like the same sex?" I joked.

"This is the _South_, Claire, we don't even _joke_ about stuff like that."

"Well, I'm from Texas, and I don't care."

"No, you're from California, you were just _born_ in Texas."

"Girls, please," Aunt Sophia urged us, silently tempted to stop walking halfway down the crowded terminal if it meant an argument could be prevented. Suffice to say, the threat worked more effectively on younger kids who actually disagreed on something.

"So I spent five whole years being born in Texas?" I said, going along with Lily's claim despite knowing what she meant. Sometimes I create arguments where there are none; I like to think that's just the athlete in me looking for some chance to one-up the competition, but maybe my friends are right and I do just come off looking like a jerk.

"Born in Houston and spent the first five years of your life there," Lily grumbled. "Whatever. But you've spent most of your life in California, right? Most of your memories are in California, right? Then you're a California girl."

"Brian Wilson would be proud," Aunt Sophia said as we turned a corner and the baggage claim conveyor belts for this airline came into view. "All right, Claire, you've got a week here with us. Any idea of what you want to do? Anything special you want to see?"

"_Anchorman_," I smiled.

"The movie?"

"Oh my god, we _have_ to see that!" Lily said, almost jumping in excitement. "Everyone I know says it's the funniest damn thing they've ever seen!"

"Okay," Aunt Sophia said, stopping us upon reaching the conveyor belt. "But can't you see that at home, Claire? I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, local attractions. The aquarium? The colonial towns? Don't you want to see those while you're here? You loved them last time."

"Yeah, I want to see them," I nodded, "but I also _really_ want to see _Anchorman_."

"We'll see if we can fit that in."

"There's my bag, there's my bag!" I said with an unusual amount of excitement that I guess was just my way of burning off the stress of the flight. I removed the large blue suitcase off the conveyor belt, double-checked the plastic tag on the cloth handle ("Claire Zielinski," Aunt Sophia said aloud while I read it to myself, "that's you."), and finally pulled out the metal handle so I could roll the luggage around on its wheels.

"I know somewhere we could go," Lily said. "And we don't even have to leave the house."

As the door opened to lead us out of the terminal and out into the airport parking lot, Aunt Sophia did little to reduce my curiosity when she told her daughter, "There's nothing there, Lily. Claire, don't listen to her. Your cousin finally got an imagination, that's all this is."

"No, Mom," Lily protested. "You're wrong. You are very, _very_ wrong. And how would you know? You haven't even bothered to check it out yourself!"

"What is it?" I asked, looking back and forth between them.

"It's our cellar," Lily replied. "Last week, I discovered this trapdoor or something in the floor." The three of us began climbing the stairs to the next level of the parking lot. "The _craziest_ things happen when you open the door. It's like some kind of portal."

"Wait, so where does it go?"

"That's what's so messed up about it. It changes _every_ time I go down into it. I got lost the first few times, but then I figured that the way back is usually through the first door you see. You open that and pass through, and you come back through the trapdoor and back in our cellar."

"Uh…wow."

"She doesn't know what she's talking about, Claire," Aunt Sophia told me as we steadily approached Uncle Bruce's truck, which they were using instead of Sophia's sedan while he was away. "It's nonsense."

"Again," Lily said, "_how_ would you know, Mom? I keep telling you to come take a look, but _no_, apparently there are more important things than fantastic scientific breakthroughs."

"You're a historian, not a scientist," Aunt Sophia said. "An amateur one for now, but still…people go to you if they want to know about Benjamin Franklin or the Civil War…"

"_American_ Civil War!"

"Exactly, that. Not wormholes or quantum physics or whatever it is that's got you hooked lately."

"Mom, I'm not trying to be a scientist now," Lily said. "I still want to be a historian. This is just me becoming an explorer, like Columbus or Lewis and Clark. Actually, this Lewis needs a Clark, and I think you fit the bill, Claire. I mean, come on, your names have the same three letters at the beginning!"

"Yeah, that's something to put on your résumé," Aunt Sophia said sarcastically, mostly to herself.

The car beeped as my aunt unlocked it, and the three of us took our respective seats: driver (mother), passenger (daughter), and back (visitor), but not before throwing my suitcase into the flatbed and ensuring its protection by closing the hood over it. Aunt Sophia turned the key in the ignition and prepared to drive us home.

"Well, Meriwether," I replied to my cousin's thought, "why not? Let's check it out together. We can start as soon as we get home."

"_Yes!_" Lily exclaimed, squirming gleefully in her seat.

Aunt Sophia sighed and turned on the radio—"Dirt Off Your Shoulder" by Jay-Z began playing, and after a sharp "_No_," from my aunt, the station quickly changed along with the song, to "Toxic" by Britney Spears. "Claire, you'd have to be crazy to follow Lily into this. There's _nothing_ in the cellar, _especially_ not a magic trapdoor."

"Are you hiding something?" I asked Aunt Sophia with genuine curiosity.

"Why would I hide a fantastic scientific breakthrough?" Aunt Sophia said, backing up the vehicle.

"Why would you _ignore_ it, I think, is the better question, Mom," Lily said.

"Lily, what you're doing is _playing_ with your discovery. That's not good."

"Oh, really? Then tell me, Mom, what _should_ I be doing with it?"

"Leaving it alone."

Lily laughed as Aunt Sophia drove the car out of the parking lot. "The great explorers didn't become so great by being _sissies_. They took action; they went where nobody had gone before; they took _risks_!"

"And that's exactly the problem with that kind of career," Aunt Sophia said, rolling her eyes at the idea of Lily entering such a field and dragging me along with her, however willingly. "The _risks_. Remember what happened to Magellan? You should, you're the one who first told me about it!"

"What happened to Magellan?" I asked while Aunt Sophia directed the car into the streets of Norfolk.

"Oh, he just pissed off some Filipinos and got hit by a poison arrow before being speared to death by the islanders," Lily nodded as I stared at her bug-eyed. "Never made it back to Spain. But that's not going to happen to us, because we're not sixteenth-century Spaniards and we're not going to the Philippines. We're going to the _cellar_!"

"It's not a good idea to play with things you don't understand," Aunt Sophia warned us.

"Mom, I understand how it works. You heard me describe it to Claire. We're fine! Come on, you can even join in, get a look at this trapdoor for yourself!"

"If you can convince me there's something worth seeing, _maybe_ I'll take a look. But I strongly suggest you stay away from that door, Lily. Claire. Because it's probably only a matter of time before someone gets hurt—if there's even something there."

As I would soon find out, there _was_ something there. It _was_ a fantastic scientific breakthrough, and something truly worth seeing. But Aunt Sophia would before too long be proven just as right about the trapdoor as Lily, and by then, the two of us would be wishing we had listened to her warnings.


	2. Chapter 2

"Come on, let's go," Lily said, leading me out the back door as soon as I'd finished setting my luggage down in the guest room. Aunt Sophia barely had time to caution us against what we were about to do by the time we exited the house. The cellar door was sloped, forming a right triangle against the back wall of the house. It was a fairly heavy piece of wood, barely used by the family, but easy enough to lift up to get inside. Once there, Lily pulled down the small metal chain hanging above the center of the room, which turned on the single dingy light bulb. With a smile, she directed me to the back corner, where an oddly placed small square door, maybe a foot and a half wide and made of surprisingly sturdier wood than the main cellar door, sat on the floor, begging to be opened. "So? What do you think?"

I got down on my knees and carefully lifted the trapdoor open by tugging on the even more surprisingly shiny metal handle, and when I did, I noticed that the other side had the same type of handle on it. But the area to which the door led down was pitch black, and there was no way to know how deep this pit was. Whether Lily was telling the truth or not, the trapdoor was already starting to freak me out.

"Do you want to go down?" Lily asked.

"Are you sure this is safe?" I replied. "Maybe we should get a flashlight or something first."

"Claire, the whole point of this is that you won't _need_ a flashlight! Think about it: wherever it takes you, you'll just have to carry it around."

I turned around and watched the afternoon sunlight pouring in through the cellar door, revealing the dust in the air. What if something goes wrong, and I never see that light again? What if I go down and can never come back out? What if I never see my friends and family again?

"I see you've got that look in your eye," Lily said. "Don't worry, Claire. Would I let you do this if I _knew_ it wasn't safe?"

"How much do you _really_ know about it, though?"

"Holy crap. You're really _scared_, aren't you?"

"I'm not _scared_, Lily," I said, even though it was something of a lie. "I'm just…_nervous_. You know, the same way I am about middle school."

"Boys?"

"Well, yeah, but there's more to it than that."

"Hey," Lily said. "You won't need to worry about embarrassing yourself or getting bad grades if you go down there. It's a portal, Claire. It doesn't have feelings. It's not going to judge you. It's a force of nature, for Pete's sake!"

"I've always wondered, who's Pete?" I asked, changing the subject but not expecting an answer, even though, considering Lily's interests, I wouldn't be surprised if she had one.

"I don't know," Lily shrugged. "Saint Peter? He's the one who guards the pearly gates, after all. Maybe it's just a way of saying our fate depends on how we handle situations like this." She looked at me and joked, "Sinners have more fun, anyway. What do you have to lose?"

I sighed and answered, "Nothing, I guess. But I want you to be here waiting for me when I come back up."

"No problem. Still want a flashlight?"

Stepping into the black hole in the ground, which as it turns out was just deep enough for my feet to reach the bottom without taking my whole body down with them, I grabbed the interior handle of the door and told Lily, "You said I'll be fine. I trust you." Before closing the door and making my way down, I reminded her, "You better not be lying about this."

"I thought you trusted me."

Still nervous, I took a deep breath and lowered the upper half of my body down into the hole, closing the door behind and above me.

* * *

Making sure to keep my eyes open to witness the spectacle of transportation in action, my actions turned out to be futile, because as soon as I closed the door, I realized I was no longer in a hole in the ground, but instead following my best friend Holly Snow out her front door onto the lawn, where a twirling sprinkler was waiting to be exploited under the hot California sun. I looked down at the purple bathing suit I was wearing, and then at Holly's blue one, now the envy of mine because it was enjoying the water and mine wasn't, and I stopped halfway to the sprinkler when it occurred to me that I hadn't even _seen_ this change happen.

"_Ah!_" I gasped, my bare feet burning on the concrete walkway. I jumped over to join my pretty friend on the much cooler grass.

Blue-eyed brunette Holly is half-Australian—her dad is from Melbourne—and I've heard people occasionally compare her to the girl who plays Rory on _Gilmore Girls_, but I don't watch the show, so I wouldn't know anything about that. She sometimes speaks in a perfect Aussie accent, but most of the time, she talks like a normal American, which is frankly odd, considering she and her father have done everything they can to completely forget about her American mom, now living in her native San Diego.

"Come on, Claire!" Holly laughed, inviting me to join her in the refreshing sprinkler. "Let's get satched!" That Australianism for "wet" was a nice confirmation of her identity.

As happy as I was to be where I was, I couldn't help but wonder: _was this really happening?_ Am I really here with Holly, or is this all in my imagination? Or is it in _her_ imagination, too?

Wow, that sun was baking. I decided to forget about these tough questions for now and just enjoy my time with Holly until it was time to go back. For the next several minutes, the two of us jumped and ran back and forth through the sprinkler water, and while Holly was simply making the most of her summer break, I couldn't let go of the questions floating around in my head.

My existential pondering was put to a quick halt when my foot accidentally collided with Holly's, sending her falling forward onto the concrete. "_Holly!_" I screamed. I rushed over to her, but luckily she was fine, except for a small bruise, maybe the size of a quarter, on her right elbow. "Are you all right?" I asked her, just to be safe. "Sorry!"

"I'm okay," Holly said. She examined the bruise and said, "That's enough fun for one day."

"It's only been five minutes," I said, turning off the water and helping Holly to her feet.

"We don't want to waste water." Always the reasonable one, that's Holly. We hurried across the burning concrete, regretting that we hadn't decided to wear sandals, grabbed the towels that had been waiting for us in the shade, and made our way into the house. At first I hesitated to walk through the front door, remembering what Lily had said about the first door you see being the way back, but when nothing happened, I figured my way back was probably going to be one of the doors inside the house. Either way, I wondered if the _real_ Holly was being affected by the events going on right now. Actually, if this wasn't the real Holly, then who the hell was she, and where the hell was _I_?

I hated these questions.

"How bad is it?" I said as we turned a corner towards the bathroom, between Holly's bedroom and her dad's.

"Nothing a little Neosporin and a band-aid won't fix," Holly said, clearly having inherited some of her father's medical expertise (he was a veterinarian). She stopped me just before we entered the bathroom together, saying, "It's okay, Claire. I can handle this." I nodded, and let her walk into the bathroom alone. After washing the wound, she opened the medicine cabinet above the sink and pulled out the Neosporin and a box of band-aids, as promised. She applied them to her bruise and then looked at me with a reassuring smile, just before telling me, "I'm going to close the door now."

"What?" I said.

"Well, I'm going to…I have to…you know…"

"_Oh_," I said. "Yeah, go ahead."

She closed the door. I waited a couple of minutes, and then she said, "Okay!" immediately after a flushing sound. I heard the faucet being turned on. "You can come in now!" I sighed, glad my friend was okay, and turned the shiny golden knob.

* * *

As I pushed open the door, I ended up not in Holly's sparkling bathroom, but back in Lily's dusty old cellar. I hadn't even blinked, yet I'd been oblivious to the change. I'd entered a horizontal door and came out a vertical one. I coughed when some dust came my way.

"Well?" Lily said. "How was it? Where'd you go?"

"How long was I gone?" I asked, closing the trapdoor as I rose up out of it.

"I don't know…five, six minutes. Why do you ask?"

"I need to use your phone."


	3. Chapter 3

"_Holly!_" I exclaimed, even though my long-distance call had yet to stop ringing. I'd already tried not once, but twice before, and was about to leave a message before I decided, screw it: I need to speak to her directly. "Pick up! Holly!"

"What's going on?" Aunt Sophia said as she joined Lily in watching me make my call from the kitchen phone. "Are you calling your friends _now_, Claire?"

I shushed them and anxiously waited for Holly to pick up. "_Holly!_" I screamed.

"What happened?" Aunt Sophia asked.

"She went down the trapdoor, and then…" Lily began, unable to finish her thought. "I don't know, Mom. Something must have scared her."

"Hello?" Holly said, finally picking up the phone.

"_Holly!_ Thank god! Are you all right?!"

"Uh…hi, Claire. How'd you know?"

"Know? Know what?"

"That I hurt myself?"

"You hurt yourself?!" I gasped. "How?!"

"I was playing in the sprinklers." Strike one. "Then I slipped and fell." Strike two. "And I bruised my elbow." Strike three. Not good in baseball, and definitely not good here.

"Which elbow?" I said after a brief pause, during which I tried to catch my breath.

"The right one." Why did I even bother asking?

"And how bad is it? How…_big_…is it?"

"Not too bad. Maybe…yay big."

"I can't see hand gestures over the phone, Holly."

"Right, sorry. I guess, the size of a quarter, maybe. But I'm fine. I'm fine. It's nothing a little Neosporin and a band-aid won't fix." She went on to explain that I hadn't interrupted her, and that she'd already finished cleaning up and going to the bathroom before answering my call. Things had happened exactly as they had under the trapdoor, except I hadn't been there this time.

"You don't say," I said, collapsing onto the nearest chair and burying my face in my other hand. I knew my aunt and cousin were watching, but I didn't care.

"Don't blame yourself."

"Say again?"

"Don't blame yourself, Claire. I was the one being stupid."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, the whole reason I slipped and fell was because I heard the phone ringing and I thought I needed to run in and get it. Silly me, I forgot about the answering machine."

"…I wasn't blaming myself, but now I kind of want to…"

"Don't, Claire. Like I said, I was the stupid one here, not you."

"Sure," I replied. "Okay." I wasn't okay at all.

"So, how's Norfolk? Glad to be seeing Lily again?"

"I'm going to have to call you back," I said with a sigh, hanging up the phone on the wall. "_What the hell, what the hell, what the hell…?_" I mumbled, mussing my hands through my hair.

"Claire?" Aunt Sophia said.

"Lily?" I answered. "Sit down. We need to talk."

Lily took a seat opposite my own at the kitchen table, and Aunt Sophia followed.

"Where have you gone when you went down that trapdoor?"

"Down the rabbit hole is more like it," Lily remarked.

"Whatever. Where have you gone?"

"Lots of places. Manhattan; some old lady's house; a Caribbean island…I mean, I guess it was in the Caribbean, I don't know for sure…"

"When you went to those places, were there people there?"

Lily laughed. "Were there people in Manhattan?"

"I mean, did you _interact_ with them? Affect them in some way?"

"Where are you going with this?"

"I think whatever we do under that trapdoor has consequences," I said. "You overheard me talking to Holly. I hurt her when I was down in the trapdoor, and now she's hurt in this _real_ world." I didn't like that the boundary between the two worlds was already starting to blur, but I liked the fact that it didn't look like I was being believed even less.

"But you weren't _in_ La Crescenta to hurt her," Lily added, referring to our tiny hometown on the northern edge of Los Angeles.

"_I_ wasn't, but my phone call was! She slipped _because_ I called her!"

"How'd Holly hurt herself?" Aunt Sophia asked.

I explained both my accidental tripping in the trapdoor world and her accidental slipping in the real world. Both were more or less my fault, it seemed.

"We're talking about wet grass here," Aunt Sophia argued. "Holly could have slipped even if she hadn't been distracted by your call. There's no way to know for sure whether or not that's what would've happened, but we all know it's true, don't we?"

At that moment, I got an idea, and I was quick to share it. "Maybe there is a way."


	4. Chapter 4

"Why are _you_ doing this?" Lily asked as I opened the trapdoor. "Why can't _I_ do it? I know this thing a whole lot better than you."

"Because you might mess up," I replied. "If we're going to see how what we do down there affects somebody else's life, I don't want to have to learn about what happens from one of you. I want to see it for myself, like I did with Holly."

"You _do_ realize that the odds that you'd end up with your best friend were _astronomically_ low," Aunt Sophia said.

"Glad you finally believe me, Mom," Lily said offhandedly.

Continuing with more of her middle-aged wisdom but ignoring her daughter's comments, Aunt Sophia said, "Not only that, a scientist should never conduct his experiments on himself. I saw Jeff Goldblum in _The Fly_."

"That was a movie."

"And we might as well be, too."

"I'm sure I'll be fine," I said. "Besides, it's the other guy we should be worried about here."

"What other guy?" Lily said.

"I don't know. I'll see when I get down there."

"What exactly are you going to do to him?"

"I don't know. Hurt him a tiny bit. Slap him or something."

"Not on the ass, I hope."

"Only if he's cute."

"Hurry back," Aunt Sophia said.

"No problem," I said, half-doubting myself. I lowered my body into the pitch-blackness of the hole in the floor, and then grabbed the lower handle of the trapdoor to close it over my head. "Remember, Aunt Sophia: we'll probably be making a long-distance phone call again when I return."

Aunt Sophia shrugged. "Whatever we have to do to prove your theory."

My theory. Wow. I never thought I'd ever become a scientist, especially one as important as this, but then again, I never thought I'd stumble upon a parallel universe under a trapdoor in my aunt's cellar in Norfolk, Virginia. I'll give Lily half the credit for the discovery.

* * *

When the door closed behind me (horizontally), I realized I was still surrounded by opaque blackness. I didn't have a lighter or a flashlight on hand. Maybe Lily was right. Maybe I _should _have brought a flashlight with me.

What was that sound? Echoing through the room I'd landed in was a steady, grating hissing noise. Swallowing, I reached forward on the ground in front of me to grasp (both literally and figuratively) what was making the sound. When my hand wrapped around something smooth and scaly, my suspicions were unfortunately given credence; when the animal to which those scales belonged recoiled and sunk its fangs into me a second later, they were confirmed.

I screamed, but when I jumped back and collided with the stone blocks that made up the walls of the room (and kicked up some sand along the way), I realized I wasn't the only human in the area. Thank god. Vague voices, and somewhat less vague music (was that Metallica?), could be heard just on the other side. Putting two and two together, I deduced that I must be at some ancient site where some people were digging, and if the sand and the snakes were any indication, that site was in a desert.

Egypt. I must be in Egypt.

"_Help!_" I shouted. "_I'm inside! I'm trapped! Get me out!_" I pounded on the millennia-old wall so as to get their attention, but that hurt my hand. Then I realized that if they heard me, they could be getting the wrong idea. Like Holly when her Aussie mannerisms started to get too unreal for other Americans to believe, I acted quickly to clarify who I was—or wasn't. "_I'm not a mummy!_" I added, feeling stupid, though considering where I was, I wondered if I would even live long enough to be embarrassed about it.

I was about to look around for some light, but then I remembered that underground sites like this hadn't seen light for thousands of years. My eyes had adjusted a little, but I still wasn't a cat or an owl, so everything was still far too dark to see. There was no light anywhere, and aside from the perpetual hissing of the snakes surrounding me, and the increasingly loud voices of the people outside and their tools, so I was forced to sigh and simply wait it out. I only hoped that none of those snakes were poisonous, or I was dead for sure.

The bite on my left hand wasn't hurting too much. But was that a good sign? For all I knew, some poisons were designed to be painless shortly before they _killed you_, and these snakes happened to carry that kind of venom. But again, I couldn't be sure about any of that.

Was I losing oxygen? There was only so much air in places like this. Wait a minute: how was I able to _enter_ this place only to get trapped inside? Quickly, I pressed my body as hard against the wall behind me as I could, hoping I could create enough force to move _something_. When that failed—not unexpectedly—I bent down to my knees and felt the stone blocks nearest the floor for one that was looser than the others and could move, because that was obviously the one I'd taken to get inside. Again nothing. Now that I remember, I hadn't even _felt_ a handle once I'd been transported here from the cellar. It was like it had simply dissipated, along with any semblance of reality.

"_Help!_" I screamed once more. "_I can hear you! I CAN HEAR YOU!_" A little bit of sand fell out from in between the stone blocks, and at this I smiled slightly. They were getting closer. "_Hello? Can you hear me?_"

I jumped and almost fell down when I suddenly felt a snake slithering between my feet, tickling my ankles. Thankfully, the snake left my personal space as quickly as it had entered it. At least now that I'd experienced that, I'd be better prepared for the next time. I didn't want there to _be_ a next time, but I wasn't really in any position to fight that.

"_Get me out of here!_" I shouted again, needlessly hurting myself as I continued to pound my hands on the wall. "_Help!_"


	5. Chapter 5

A good (bad) ten minutes later, the diggers finally finished their excavation, or at least the part of it that led them to where I was. Like a flash of lightning, I zipped out of there, only to fall forward onto the burning sand. Some twenty people total, mostly men and none nearly as cute or charismatic as Brendan Fraser in _The Mummy_, made up the archaeological (?) party, and upon my exit from the ancient structure, they all stared at me, with good reason.

Giving me his hand, one of the men, in his forties or so and with a full scruffy brown beard dominating his well-shaded face (I needed one of those hats, right now), helped me up and led me towards their vehicles, where shade, food, drinks, and _shade_ awaited.

"Where in the hell did _you_ come from?" he said, handing me an icy water bottle as I took a seat inside one of their cars.

After taking a long sip of water that emptied around a quarter of the bottle, I wiped my lips and replied, "Trust me, you don't want to know."

"Really?" the man said. "I don't want to know where a twelve-year-old kid who suddenly appears inside a tomb that hasn't seen daylight in thousands of years comes from?"

"Los Angeles," I said with a shrug. A second later, having recovered from the shock of confinement and the escape thereof, I took notice of the music they were playing. "'Creeping Death,' all right. Good choice."

"Metallica fan, are you?"

"_Mike, are we being punk'd?!_" one of the younger-looking men at the door of the tomb shouted back to the man talking to me.

"_I wouldn't worry about it, guys!_" Mike shouted back.

"Really? I wouldn't worry about finding a twelve-year-old kid inside a tomb that supposedly hasn't seen daylight for thousands of years?"

"Yeah."

The men sighed and continued on with their work, while Mike resumed his interrogation of me. "Is that a bite on your hand?"

"Yeah," I nodded, "lots of snakes in there. I don't know how many, because it was so dark, but it was, you know, a _lot_. Nothing's happened to me yet, so I guess they aren't poisonous. I feel great, actually. But maybe that's just the freedom talking. I don't know. It's nice to hear _Ride The Lightning_ again." I took another long drink of water while Mike remained rightfully confused.

"What do you think of _St. Anger_?" Mike asked, with a guilty look as though he were thinking, "of all the things I could be asking, I'm asking her _this_?!"

"Sucks," I said. "The first couple songs are the only good ones, I think. Kind of want to see the movie, though. Too bad it's rated R."

"If your parents let you listen to Metallica, why wouldn't they let you see _Some Kind of Monster_? I mean, sure there's cursing and stuff, but—"

"Because it's rated R, and that's all there is to it."

"But I'm assuming you have the album, _St. Anger_? And that your parents are aware of the Parental Advisory label slapped on there?"

"I got it. They've seen it."

"Your parents need to let go a little."

"They're not so bad. Even if my Dad _did_ cheat on my Mom when I was little."

"You're a child of divorce, I take it, then?"

"Yup," I said. "But they're trying to reconcile—again—right now. That's one reason why I'm staying with my relatives in Virginia this week. Of course, for all I know, they're reconciling all over the house while I'm gone."

"Okay, too much information there," Mike said. "Do you need a phone?"

"Maybe later," I said, remembering my duty to inflict pain—minor, of course—upon someone here before fleeing home through one of the doors around me. After taking one last lasting drink of water from the bottle, I said, "Excuse me," and made my way out of the car and back to the ruins from whence I'd come.

"What—what the hell are you _doing_?" Mike said, quickly following me. As I lowered my head to fit into the three-foot-tall hole in the wall, I heard him say, "Are you _crazy_? We don't even know your name!"

"_Claire Zielinski!_" I shouted back to him. I almost slipped on some sand and fell right onto a number of snakes, but luckily, I caught my balance and, of course, could see the imposing reptiles in the light this time, and, as a tertiary safeguard, there was a whole team of people well aware of presence and looking out for me.

Alas, none of that was enough for me to notice the mistake I'd just made. My shouting had received the requisite shushes from the archaeological team, and I was quick to comply, but as I made my way down the well-lit corridor towards them, neither me nor the seven or so team members noticed the effect my shouting had had on the structure surrounding us. In a minute, we'd all be running for our lives.


	6. Chapter 6

"How sturdy is this place?" a man in the middle of the line traveling down the ancient corridor asked no one in particular.

"It's still here, isn't it?" one of his female colleagues replied.

"Good point."

"You mind telling us how you got here, kid?" the thirty-something blond guy walking in front of me said. "Claire?"

"That's right," I nodded in response to the name question. "But like Mike said, I wouldn't worry about it. You're better off not knowing. And you wouldn't believe me if even if I did tell you. _And_, it's not going to matter in the long run anyway. So why bother?"

"Finding a mysterious kid inside an ancient Egyptian tomb is the next best thing to finding a mummy with an actual curse."

"When did that become a _good_ thing?"

"Never. It's just that such a thing would be a slap in the face to all us rational-thinking scientists and historians, and a pat on the back to all the crazies that believe in that stuff but were always ignored. So by all means, Claire, humor us."

"What's your name? Your full name?"

"Adam Nicholas Levinson. Why?"

I was about to push Adam forward and knock him onto the ground—leaving him at most slightly bruised—but before I could do that, we all stopped in our tracks upon hearing the harsh sound of rocks scraping across rocks, or in this case, bricks across bricks. In silence, we stood there, just listening to this increasingly loud noise, waiting, knowing that it couldn't mean anything good and that we really should start moving.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Booby trap?" someone suggested.

"But what triggered it?" another one added. "It's all happening on the other side of these walls, I can't see a damn thing!"

"…My shouting?" I said just loud enough to be heard.

"You shouted _once_," Adam said, "and that was at the entrance. If this is a booby trap, that's probably bad, but not only is not very effective, because nothing's happening to us, it's also a little too slow. But it _has_ been a few thousand years, I guess we can't put the architects at fault if the mechanics of the building are a little off."

"Does anyone else think we should get moving?" a guy towards the front asked, looking backwards rather longingly. "Just because nothing's happened, doesn't mean nothing _won't_. That sound isn't stopping."

Suddenly, we heard a huge crash, and then, a second later, saw pieces of sand fall from the ceiling onto our clothes, a precursor to the forthcoming danger. We barely had time to comprehend the cause of the falling sand before that danger arrived, in full force: up ahead, the bricks that made up the wall become undone, collapsing domino-style and quickly heading our way.

"_Run!_" we all shouted at once. The entrance to the tomb was some two hundred feet back in the other direction, but the shouting of an obvious solution proved to do more harm than good, as the wall seemed to just cave in on us even faster afterward.

In our scrambling to get to the door first, it suddenly become survival of the fittest, Darwinism at its finest. Maybe it was my youth and athleticism, maybe it was the guilt I was feeling for bringing this misfortune upon all these innocent people, or maybe it was some kind of fate, but I made it to the door first—and last. No one else was able to flee the underground tomb in time.

Mike and several of his colleagues pulled me away, and although I just kept on running without turning around, their gasps were a good indication of whatever was happening to the tomb. One of them opened the back door to his SUV and tossed me inside, but I didn't land on a soft cushioned seat.

I blinked once, and when my eyes opened milliseconds later, I was back on my aunt and uncle's dirty cellar floor. The trapdoor seemed to slam itself shut behind me. Lily and Aunt Sophia helped me up, covered in burning sand and a snakebite (which the sand wasn't being kind to), and as the terror spread from my face onto theirs, we slowly left the cellar—and locked it.


	7. Chapter 7

Three hours later, Aunt Sophia was driving Lily and I back from the theatre, and after all I'd been through earlier in the day, it felt great, just great, to be laughing again. Aunt Sophia found the movie enjoyable, too, but not nearly as much as Lily and I did, even though the seventies setting should have made her better identify with the film. "It was better than _Starsky & Hutch_," she told us on the way out. "I'll give you that." What she didn't enjoy was the song her daughter and niece asked to hear on the car ride home. "Okay, _no_," Aunt Sophia said sternly. "We're not playing that song, girls."

"Oh, _come on_, Mom!" Lily said with a gleeful grin. "It's not _that_ bad!"

"That's easy for _you_ to say," Aunt Sophia replied. "You didn't grow up with that damn song playing all over the airwaves 24/7!"

"I think you're exaggerating," I said.

"Well, it sure _felt_ omnipresent," Aunt Sophia, inadvertently giving me a new word to look up in the dictionary once we got back to the house.

"Did you happen to catch the words, Claire?" Lily asked, turning around to look at me in the back seat. "Maybe we can sing it."

"Holly's a better singer than I am," I said with a shrug.

"But did you?"

"Sure, I guess."

"You don't need to be a pro to sing well. It just takes practice."

"But doesn't lots of practice kind of turn you into a pro, anyway?"

"Well, it's not like _I_ practice singing a lot," Lily told me. "Usually I just belt it out in the shower, when I'm alone and nobody can care. But if you put a gun to my head and told me to sing something, I could still do it."

"Lily, if someone put a gun to your head and told you to sing 'Afternoon Delight,' of all things," Aunt Sophia said, "I'd be more worried about what's going on in _his_ head than the bullet he's threatening to put through _yours_."

"Wow," Lily said, "you'd make a terrible hostage negotiator, Mom."

"And he'd make a terrible hostage taker, Lily."

"_Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight…_" I began singing at random, and the sudden outburst of that particular lyrics and melody caused my aunt to stop much more suddenly at the red light than she would have.

"_Claire!_" Aunt Sophia cried. "Not while I'm driving!"

"_Gonna grab some afternoon delight…_" Lily continued.

"Kids, I'm moving around two tons of metal at thirty miles an hour here! Sing something else before we end up causing a crash!"

"You're taking this all very lightly," Lily remarked.

"Aren't we _all_ doing that?" Aunt Sophia said. "Claire just discovered an inter-dimensional portal that allows us to be in places we normally couldn't go to and affect other people's realities with the slightest things we do while we're there, and instead of contacting a scientist, we go to see _Anchorman_?!"

Lily and I exchanged glances before returning to look at Aunt Sophia, who, like us, had an expression conveying both relief and confusion with regards to the situation. On the one hand, ignoring the trapdoor was probably a good idea, but on the other, we were sitting on the cusp of a major scientific discovery, one that could potentially change the future of mankind.

"People thought the automobile would kill us all," Lily said. "That didn't stop Henry Ford."

"I was just making a point," Aunt Sophia said. "I really think we should stay away from that trapdoor, guys."

"It's not an automobile, either," I added. "At least with a car, you at least have _some_ control. When we go down inside that trapdoor, Lily, we have _no idea_ where we're going."

"Which is _exactly_ why we need to bring someone in!" Lily smiled back. "Give them the time and the money, and they just might find the secret behind the magic!" As we pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the vehicle, she enthusiastically added, "For all we know, maybe there are other doors just like that one!" while pointing towards the backyard. "But until we tell actually _tell_ someone, we're never going to _know_! A little science never hurt anybody, did it?"

"What about the apple that fell on Newton's head?" I said.

"Bunk," Lily scoffed. "Bull. Myth. It never happened. Study enough history, Claire, and you'd know that. Most of what we learn along those lines has been romanticized so it's easier to digest. Yeah, Columbus discovered America, but not before the Vikings, and not without bringing diseases and helping to wipe out the natives."

"Speaking of responsibility," Aunt Sophia said while Lily did the honor of unlocking the front door, "let's not forget that _what we do down there is affecting other people's lives_!" She pointed her index finger downward, because that's where the trapdoor was, at least generally speaking. "We all heard what happened with Holly, didn't we? That's why we went to the movies instead of calling someone we don't even know in Egypt! Lily, if this trapdoor is as dangerous as it seems to be, I don't think of any of us should risk endangering the lives of others just so scientists can learn a little something!"

"But that's exactly the thing, Mom," Lily said. The three of us took seats in the den, relaxing on Bruce's recliner (me) or on the main sofa (Lily and Sophia), both a matching forest green in color. "We _don't_ have responsibility. Not in _this_ world. Going down there is like going to Vegas: what happens there, _stays_ there, or at least our part in it."

"If those people in Egypt died inside that tomb—"

"…Then Claire didn't do it."

"Maybe not," I said. "But I sure as hell fell the guilt over it."

"The _unnecessary_ guilt," Lily said, sighing and shaking guilt. "Look, Claire, were you in Egypt today? I mean, _really_, were you actually _in_ Egypt today? Hell no! You were in another _version_ of Egypt. That Mike guy, whoever he is, he's not going to know who you are if we were to contact him. This is the nature of a parallel universe, don't you see?"

"The same thing happens," I said, "except _we're_ there. Yeah, I get it, Lily: I still have a clean slate here at home. But the _guilt_ crosses over, damn it! And _maybe_, the events do, too!"

Lily grumbled. "We've been _over_ this! You didn't cause Holly to fall, and you didn't cause that tomb to collapse either. _Accidents_, Claire."

"Fine," I said, "but what if I were to actually, physically _kill_ someone?"

"Uh, Claire?" Aunt Sophia said. "What the hell are you talking about? You would never do something like that? …Would you?"

"No, but theoretically, if I _were_ to kill someone while I was inside the trapdoor…would they be dead when I came back?"

"You _wouldn't_ do that!"

"_And I'm not insinuating that I would! Just listen to me!_"

"Who would you kill?" Lily asked.

"Uh, _nobody_," I said, laughing uneasily at the question. "I'm not a murderer."

"Why not?" she continued. "You said so yourself: a clean slate back home. Claire, if someone were to actually _do_ that while inside the trapdoor, they'd be a veritable Freddy Kruger; everyone's safe in the real world, but in the dream world, or in this case, the parallel universe, you better watch your back."

"See, this is _exactly_ why we should just leave the damn thing alone," Aunt Sophia said. "It's just too dangerous. Even if scientists can figure out how it works, there's always going to some assholes who don't want to use it for good, and the whole world will go to hell in a hand basket." There was a pause after this during which the three of us looked back and forth at each other, all arguing both within and between ourselves but not saying anything to further those arguments. "In fact, no more going down to the trapdoor, _ever_."

"_For god's sake--!_" Lily moaned. "_Mom!_"

"Claire, I don't think I have to worry about you, but Lily, you heard me. _Stay away from that door_."

"This is _bull_—"

"_Don't you finish that,_" Aunt Sophia warned, raising a threatening finger.

"I've heard worse," I said. "A lot worse."

"_Sky rockets in flight…_" Lily sang out of nowhere.

Aunt Sophia groaned and then angrily told Lily, "_Stay away from the trapdoor_."


	8. Chapter 8

_Thursday, July 15, 2004_

I was awakened in the middle of the night by a sudden draft and the sound of a door opening. I gasped and pulled the covers in the guest bed over my head. Had someone broken into the house? Were they going to kill us and then rob us after we can't do anything about it? I shivered despite the warm air and bed sheets wrapped around me.

After a minute of waiting, however, the next sound I heard was surprisingly not as threatening as I thought it would be. It was Lily's voice, and instead of screaming or making some other noise in response to an intruder in the house, she was saying to herself, "There you are, shoes! All right." I peeked out from under the covers and watched her exit her bedroom and head out towards the back door. Where was she going?

Quickly, I rose out of the comfy bed, did as Lily had just done by putting socks and then shoes on over my feet, and hurrying after her. Lily had been carrying a flashlight anyway, making finding her an easy chore. She was unlocking the cellar.

She was going to the trapdoor.

"_Lily!_" I whispered as loudly as I could, while she slowly, gently opened the cellar door.

She turned to look at me, put her finger over her lips and shushed me. "_Don't tell my Mom, okay?_"

"_Lily, we're out here in our pajamas!_" I reminded her, as if that or anything else I said to her was going to be eye opening and make her rethink her decision. "_Are you crazy?!_"

"_I've never gone down there at night_," Lily told me while I walked down the steps and into the yard to join her. "_Maybe it works differently after dark_."

"_Like what, Gremlins?_" I said. I looked my watch. "_It's one o'clock in the morning, Lily! Forget it!_"

"_No_," Lily said. She stepped down into the cellar. I grabbed her arm and tried to stop her, but she just pushed my hand away and kept on walking.

"_Your Mom's going to kill you when you get back!_" I cried. "_You know that, right?_"

"_So?_" Lily pulled the trapdoor up, looked down, and then looked at me again. "_What's the worst she can do? This trapdoor, this cellar's not going anywhere, Claire. Sooner or later, I'll be able to come back to it._"

"_Don't do it, Lily_."

"_Wow, that's a great argument, I never considered it that way_." She put one foot down into the trapdoor. "_See you later_."

"_Lily! Damn it, Lily!_"

With one final wave, she said, "_Bye_," and closed the door on top of her.

"_NO!_" Without thinking (although Lily did have the only flashlight), I dived for the door, opened it (naturally, it was empty again), jumped inside, and tried to follow Lily to wherever she went by closing the trapdoor as I fell downward.

…And kept on falling.

It was still the middle of the night, and I was still in my pajamas, but I was free-falling thousands of feet above the ground. As fast-moving air muffled my terrified screaming, I saw a well-lit city off in the distance. Upon looking upward, through the wet clouds I saw the lights belonging to an increasingly distant plane, apparently one from which I had just ended up skydiving from.

"_LILY!_" I yelled at the top of my lungs. Who heard me say it, I don't know. But just the thought that Lily, or for that matter, _anyone_ might have heard my cry was comforting. It was an imagined possibility for a hopeless comfort, but at the time being, it was sufficient.

With no other option, I looked down once more at the death waiting for me in what I now recognized as a thick tropical forest, and closed my eyes. All I could do now was wait for the end.


	9. Chapter 9

I woke up safe in my own bed. Well, not _my_ bed, but the bed in my aunt and uncle's guest bedroom.

It had all been a dream.

I smiled, relieved.

Looking at the bedside clock, I saw that it was just past noon. The afternoon sun was peeking in through the curtains. I crawled out of bed and opened the curtains to let in the warm light, and then, without bothering to change out of my pajamas, headed out towards the kitchen and living room for some brunch.

The kitchen smelled like eggs, bacon, and pancakes—yum. Sometimes the best meals are the most generic ones. Aunt Sophia was sitting on the sofa, drinking some coffee and reading the Thursday paper.

"Afternoon Delight" was playing on the stereo system by the TV. That was my first clue that something was off.

"Look who finally woke up," Aunt Sophia said, watching me prepare my own plate.

"I thought you hated this song," I said with a yawn.

"I've always loved this song," she replied. "What are you talking about, Claire?"

"Never mind." I stole a bite of bacon even before I had "officially" finished gathering all of my food, but who doesn't love bacon? "So what's the plan for today?"

"That's up to your cousin."

"Since when?"

"Since she came to visit from California yesterday."

I almost dropped my plate onto the kitchen floor after I heard that. "_What?!_"

My aunt sighed and then dropped something of a bombshell on me. "Lily came in to visit from L.A. while her parents are making up—_again_. Your father's on the sub for a while, so it's just us girls for the week. I hope the break from school hasn't made you forget _that_ much!"

That's when I _did_ drop the plate.

"_Claire!_"

Hurrying out of the kitchen and running towards my cousin's bedroom, I cried, "_Lily!_"

"Claire, get back here!" my "Mom" shouted back to me.

In my mad dash to the other bedroom, I made what was intended as a brief glance into the "guest" bedroom where I'd been sleeping and ended up seeing my _Pirates of the Caribbean_ poster hanging on the wall. Cautiously, I moved away from my cousin's door and back into my "temporary" bedroom, which by the looks of it wasn't that temporary after all.

All my books and CDs and DVDs I had back "home" turned out to be neatly (well, as neatly as any twelve-year-old could be) stacked onto the shelves in the room. My _Pirates_ poster, along with the Metallica (_Master of Puppets_) and Adam Brody posters, hanged on the walls, just as they had back in La Crescenta. It was nice to know that, even in alternate realities I had no desire to be a part of, I still had my good taste, but that alone was not enough to redeem the unfortunate nature of these circumstances.

Having realized what exactly was going on, I ran into the neighboring room to wake up a soundly sleeping Lily.

Given the seriousness of the situation, I saw no problem in jumping right onto her.

Lily screamed and jumped out of bed ("I'm up! I'm up!"), and then I grabbed her shoulder and explained, as quickly as I could, what appeared to be going on.

"How the hell did _that_ happen?" she asked.

"_Duh!_ The _trapdoor_, Lily! We went down there last night, and now look where we are!"

"Is California worth it?"

"_Lily!_"

"Sorry, just thinking out loud here. Yeah, Claire, we need to get out of here."

I sighed. "Back to the trapdoor."

"You're not serious," Lily said. "Isn't that what caused this whole mess in the first place?"

"Actually, that was _you_. _You're_ the one who decided it would be a good idea to run down into the cellar in the middle of the night, Lily! And now look: we're _cousins_!"

"…We were already cousins."

"Well…_reversed_ cousins." I grabbed Lily's arm and began pulling her away, eager to go back down the trapdoor in the hopes of returning to our original state. "Come on! Let's go!"

"_Claire, get back out here!_" Sophia shouted from the kitchen. "_We need to talk!_"

Lily wasn't budging. "Damn it, Lily, what's the matter?"

"You mean besides the obvious?"

"_Yeah!_"

"Can't we at least get dressed first?" She looked down at the pajamas she was wearing, and then I looked at mine. They were the same as the ones we'd had back in the "real" world, but that clearly wasn't her issue with the garments. "I mean, if we're going to go down into a dusty old cellar and then a magical trapdoor so we can travel to an alternate reality, can't we at least do it in clothes we don't have to sleep in?"

I wanted to argue against that, but she had a point. Nevertheless, I managed to remember something from my first trip down the trapdoor. "When I showed up at Holly's, I ended up in my bathing suit. The trapdoor changed my clothing _for_ me, and I'll bet it's done that for you, too, at some point."

My "Mom" then appeared, having walked over to join us from the kitchen. Her arms were folded and her face was angry, her mouth ready to convey a punishment of some sort to me for breaking the plate. "Claire, what's going on?"

"Don't worry, Aunt—Mom, in just a minute, this will all be sorted out." I turned to Lily and said, "Forget about your clothes, Lily, we gotta go!"

"Go where?" Sophia asked.

"But if the trapdoor can _change_ our clothes," Lily said, "who's to say it can't take them _off_, too? We're going to turn up naked somewhere!"

"The trapdoor? I already told you two to stay away from there!"

"We're _not_ going to turn up naked somewhere," I told Lily, ignoring my "mother." I continued to tug on her arm, without much success. "_Come on!_"

"You're not going down to the trapdoor again," Sophia said, shaking her head. "And even if you _were_, which you _aren't_, you're not going to do it in your pajamas. We just had those washed."

"Thanks, Mom," Lily said.

"What?" She was confused, and rightly so.

I growled to express my frustration and let go of my cousin's arm.

"You're paying for a new plate, Claire," Sophia said. "And it's coming out of your allowance."

"This _sucks_," I groaned. Heading towards the back door, I told off the other two by saying, "Fine! I'll go alone! I don't need you to get back my real parents!"

My "Mom" ran in front of me before I could open the door. "We've had this conversation, Claire. You're not adopted. I've shown you the birth pictures." Lily let out a small laugh that caused more bewilderment for Sophia. "Now stay out of the cellar like I told you to. We have a _guest_. Let's see what _she_ wants to do."

We both turned to look at Lily. I glared at her, hoping my expression would be enough to convince her to go with me down the trapdoor again later on, without much hope.

With a shrug, Lily smirked and said, "How about the aquarium?"

I groaned. If I'd never learned about the trapdoor, I would've been reasonably excited to see the aquarium again, but in our present situation, all I wanted was out.

"The aquarium it is," Sophia said, patting my back gently. "You two get dressed. We don't have all day."

I sighed and gave my "Mom" a pitiful look.

"Oh, don't give me that," Sophia said as she walked back into the kitchen. "We already saw _Anchorman_. You'll just have to wait until the DVD comes out if you want to see it again."

Boy, it's a good thing the important issues were being addressed.


	10. Chapter 10

That afternoon, we returned from the aquarium in Virginia Beach, and on any other day, I might have been exhausted from a tiring day, but under the circumstances, I was instead made much more invigorated as the day went by, awaiting the arrival back at the house so Lily and I could get out of here.

As soon as Sophia unlocked the front door, I dashed inside.

"That was rude, Claire," my "Mom" groaned. To be fair, she was right; I'd simply ran past both her and Lily in my hurry to get inside. "You know, you've had a bad attitude all day."

"Well, you're not going to have to worry about that much longer," I said, so excited to be home again that I was practically jumping. "Come on, Lily! Let's go!"

"Go where? You two aren't going to the trapdoor again, are you?"

Lily nodded but didn't say anything.

"You better be prepared to suffer the consequences if you do."

"Way to show discipline there, Mom," Lily joked.

"What?" Sophia replied. "Stop calling me that, Lily."

"I think it's already too late to avoid the consequences," I said. "If you really want to stop me, _Mom_, you're going to have to catch me first." Looking at my cousin, I added, "And Lily, too."

"You're not going anywhere, young lady."

"I know. That's why you're going to have to catch me." And with that said, I dashed off again, zooming through the house, unlocking the back door at lightning speed, and almost jumping into the backyard. Upon reaching the cellar door, I realized I was alone. "_Lily!_" I shouted, sighing shortly thereafter. "_Lily, come out here!_" No answer. Hell, my "Mom" wasn't even coming outside to inflict swift justice on a misbehaving child. "_Anybody?!_"

Was this reverse psychology? It wasn't working.

"Screw this," I said, opening the cellar door. Dust sprang out at me, but as soon as it had settled, I made my way down, and opened the trapdoor once again. I looked back a final time, just in case, but still nobody was coming, not to join me nor to discipline me.

There must have been something _really_ good on TV.

"_I'm going down now!_" I shouted. I doubted anyone could hear me inside the house from here, but it was worth it just to try and get someone's attention. "_The trapdoor's open! I'm about to be a bad, bad girl!_"

_Nothing_.

"_You both suck!_" I leaped down into the trapdoor and slammed it behind me.

Oh please, let me be back in the real world now.


	11. Chapter 11

I awoke with a yawn. When did I fall asleep? Whatever. As I arose from under the sheets, I examined my body, just to be safe. When I saw how much I'd grown overnight, that's when I got scared.

I was taller, but that didn't concern me so much as the expansion my chest had undergone. "Oh, great," I said with a sigh as I stared down at what I dearly hoped wasn't the result of some kind of discreet plastic surgery.

"Why am I looking at my boobs?"

"The hell?" I said.

"Who's that?" the other voice said, echoing my thoughts about her. "Who's in there?"

"In there?" I said. "I'm not anywhere. I'm in my—" and I realized, this wasn't _my_ room I had been sleeping in. "This is _Lily's_ room," I gasped, if the various American history-themed things scattered around the place were any indication.

"Claire?"

"_Wait a minute._" I rushed out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, where I looked into the mirror above the sink and screamed. "_Oh my god!_"

"I'm in your body, Claire!" Lily observed from her end.

"And I'm in yours!"

After staring at "my" reflection for a moment, I slapped myself in the face one, two, three times in a row.

"_Ow!_" I heard Lily cry.

"Sorry," I said, not quite sure if I meant it or not. I turned the faucet on and splashed some water in my face, for much the same reason I'd just slapped myself/ourselves. "You felt that?" I asked.

"Whatever your body does, mine does, too!" Lily explained. "It hurts!"

"I said I was sorry!"

"It's not just the slapping!" Lily said. "It's _everything_! I feel _everything_!"

"You mean, like, if I do this," I said, scratching the back of one hand with the fingers of the other, "you feel it, too?"

"_Yeah! _So _stop it_!"

"I can't just _stop_ moving, Lily!" I said. Beginning to feel woozy, I moved to sit down on the toilet.

"_Ow!_" Lily cried, along with a crashing sound. My head pounded as the sound reverberated inside. "_Claire!_"

"_What did I do?!_"

"I'm in _your_ house!"

"_So?_"

"There's no chair here!"

"_So?!_"

"I'm on my back in the bathtub here!"

"Well, what do you want _me_ to do about it?"

"I already told you! _Stop moving!_"

"_Claire?_" the voice of an older woman I hadn't heard in a while said. I felt compelled to answer, until I noticed that the voice was only in my head.

Lily, however, was there to meet the one calling my name. "Aunt Lis—Mom?"

"_My_ mom?" I said quietly, though it wasn't as if Mom could hear me anyway.

"Lily?" Aunt Sophia called from the living room.

"What are you doing in the tub?" Mom said to Lily, shortly after the sound of her footsteps stopped, presumably upon entering the bathroom at our house. "Are you okay?"

Thinking quickly, I remembered what we'd learned in the past few minutes. I gave a thumbs-up to nobody in my sights, but if I was doing this correctly, my Mom was receiving the signal.

"Fine," Lily told her. "Fine, Mom."

I watched Aunt Sophia step into the bathroom I'd been sitting in a moment later. "Who are you talking to, Lily?" she asked me.

"Let me help you up," Mom told Lily. I could hear her grab Lily's arms to do so, but rather than the reassuring sound of a body being lifted out of the tub, instead I heard the sound of a struggle, almost like she were trying to lift something much heavier. "_Claire!_"

"_I can't move_," Lily said.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds, now starting to get a clearer understanding of what was truly going on. My cousin was going through an inescapable hell, and there was nothing I could do about it.

"Lily?" Aunt Sophia said, placing her hand on my shoulder. "Did you hear me?"

"_Wally, call a doctor!_" I heard my Mom shout. My ears hurt from the panicked cry, and my eyes began to tear up.

"_No,_" I said in response to what I was hearing with Lily and Mom in California.

"No?" Aunt Sophia asked me. "Why are you crying, Lily? What happened?" She kneeled down onto her knees to comfort me.

I tried not to move, for Lily's sake, but not only was this option just as bad as the alternative; I couldn't even keep it up for too long before failing. I had been looking straight forward, at the wall and floor of the bathroom I was sitting in, but Aunt Sophia lightly put her hands on my face and pulled it to look towards her. And I knew Lily could feel this change in direction. "_What's going on?_" Aunt Sophia demanded in a motherly fashion.

I couldn't even answer the question.

In my head, I heard another fast-moving set of feet, those of my father, as he entered the bathroom to see Lily, in my body, "sitting" on her back in the bathtub. "I've called 911," he said. "An ambulance is on its way. It's going to be okay, sweetie."

"_Lily!_" Aunt Sophia said, tapping me on the cheek. "_Wake up!_"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Do you want me to call a doctor?"

"No, I'm just going to stay here, if that's all right."

"_Why?_ If you don't tell me what's going on, I can't help you, Lily!"

"Claire, can you hear me?" I heard Dad say.

"_Yes!_" I said without thinking. I guess I secretly hoped that somehow, he would hear me say this.

But he didn't. He heard Lily instead. "_Yes,_" she said in a whimper.

"Are you…" he said, swallowing to prepare himself for the possibility of living with a daughter who was "…_paralyzed_?"

"…Yes," Lily said. "…And no."

"What do you mean?"

"Lily, it's me," Aunt Sophia said, continuing her futile attempts to connect with me during these horrifying moments. "Your mother. Can you hear me?"

"_Make it stop!_" I screamed, jumping off the toilet seat. A second later, I heard another crashing sound, another painful echo through my head, as Lily was tossed around by my careless movement.

"_Claire!_" Mom and Dad gasped at once, while Aunt Sophia shouted, "_Lily!_"

"_Lily, what happened?_" I shrieked, flailing my arms around, again without thinking. "_I'm sorry! Speak to me!_"

"_Is she having a seizure?!_" Mom cried. Quickly, I stopped moving my arms. Or, I tried to, but the nervous fear the events we were experiencing caused them to keep moving, albeit in smaller, more controlled motions now.

"_I'm calling a doctor!_" Aunt Sophia said, running out of the bathroom to get the phone.

"I hit my head," Lily said to me. "On the wall."

"_I'm so sorry!_" I told her. I lifted one hand toward my mouth to begin biting my fingernails, only to remember soon thereafter that Lily was being forced to do the same. "_No!_" I said with an angry swing of my arm.

"_You hit me!_" Dad shouted. "Right in the _eye_!"

"_Dad!_" I cried.

"I feel like I'm gonna throw up," Lily said.

"We called the paramedics, honey," Mom said. "They're on their way, Claire. But you _need_ to sit down now!"

I screamed louder than I ever have before.

"_Lily!_" Aunt Sophia shouted, running back into the bathroom where I was. "Whatever's going on, I _promise_ you, we're going to fix it!" The phone still in her hand, I watched her speak into it: "Yes? Um, it's my daughter, Lily. I don't know what happened; I—I think she's hearing voices in her head or something. She's screaming, like she's trying to help them…."

"_It's Lily!_" I tried to tell her, even knowing how foolish I sounded. "She's _me_ now, I'm Claire, and she's me!"

"…That's her," Aunt Sophia nodded while continuing to talk to the doctor on the other end. "She's talking gibberish. She's going crazy. No, nothing like this has ever happened before…."

"_Hang up the phone! There's nothing you can do!_"

"Sit down, Lily."

"Lily's in California! I'm _Claire_!"

"No, you're not, now _sit down_."

"_No!_" Scaring all parties involved, I ran up to my aunt to pull the telephone out of her hand, once again completely forgetting about my obligation to protect the cousin whose body I was controlling. I managed to grab the phone and hang it up, but not before hearing screams from my parents and Lily as the latter tore past them. "_Where are you?_" I asked Lily.

"_Hallway_," she grunted back. "_Ow. Damn it! That hurt!_"

"How many times do I have to tell you I'm _sorry_?" I said.

Aunt Sophia stole the phone from my distracted hand and said, "_Who are you talking to?_"

"_Lily!_"

"_What?_" Lily replied.

"No, no, your _mom_!"

"_Lily!_" Aunt Sophia said, rightfully thinking I'd just insulted her in some way.

"_Mom?_" Lily said. Meaning she could hear _my_ world in her head just as I could hear hers in mine.

"Right here, honey!" my Mom told her.

"_The trapdoor!_" Lily shrieked. "_Get to the trapdoor!_" It took me a moment to register the fact that this order was directed at me.

"_The trapdoor!_" I repeated her words.

"Oh, no, you're not going to the trapdoor, Lily," Aunt Sophia shook her head.

But I ignored her and made a run for it.

Sadly, that didn't last long. I'd barely entered the kitchen before a force out of my control (for once) stopped me dead in my tracks, or nearly so. My head started spinning, my legs grew numb, and my eyes blinked rapidly in an attempt to stay open and awake. I collapsed onto the floor, unconscious. And things were only going to get worse from there.


	12. Chapter 12

_Tuesday, July 20, 2004_

When I woke up next, I was in a hospital bed, appropriately with one of their designated robes placed over my real clothes. The doctors had placed an IV in my arm. Unfortunately, I was still stuck in Lily's body.

It only took a matter of seconds before I realized that the patient I could see in the corner of my eye in the bed to my left wasn't someone else; it was _me_. A mirror image of me, mimicking my every move: when I waved my arm at her, she did the same at me. But despite the fact that I was in Lily's body, the mirror image I was looking at was _my_ body, my real body.

"Lily?"

My aunt's voice startled me. I turned to look at her, standing at the left side of the bed, only to realize that there was a mirror image of her, too, standing beside that of me.

"What?" I said lazily, continuing to look at the image. Out of curiosity, I looked to my right, where another mirror image of the two of us could be seen. Straight ahead, I saw the same thing. "Who's over there?" I asked Aunt Sophia, pointing to the duplicates of her and I to my left, her right.

"It's…another patient," Sophia said as though it should've been obvious.

"And…over there?" I said, turning to my right and pointing to _that_ mirror.

"Another patient. You're in the hospital, Lily. You've been unconscious for five days."

Where was Lily's voice? I could hear her before I'd fallen unconscious. So where was she now? Was she still in my body in California? Was she okay?

"How's, um, Claire?" I said.

"Funny you should ask," Sophia said, placing a comforting hand on my cheek. "Your aunt and uncle called. Something happened to her on the same day you fell," she explained, rubbing her hand through my hair, "and she fell unconscious, too. Are you still hearing those voices in your head?"

"No," I said. And that's what worried me, although I didn't tell Aunt Sophia that. "Why are you here? Shouldn't you be at work right now?"

"I've been visiting you everyday since the accident. I had to know my only daughter was okay."

Those mirrors were still creeping me out. Every little gesture my aunt and I made, they repeated in unison. Where were they coming from? Why was I seeing them in the first place?

Of course, the answer was obvious. It was the trapdoor. That damn trapdoor.

Thinking about that damn trapdoor at that moment turned out to be an epiphany of sorts. Unlike my misadventures with Holly back home and in that ancient Egyptian tomb, in this alternate reality, I was in Norfolk, and therefore, if I wanted to, I could access the trapdoor. On the other hand, when Lily was me and I was her before, I'd gone down the trapdoor and ended up in this, an arguably even worse reality to be caught in. Still, the thought that, maybe, going down there again would return everything to normal wouldn't leave me. It was a long shot, but it just might work.

"I want to go home," I said forcefully, grabbing my aunt's blouse.

"I know you do, sweetie," Aunt Sophia said. "And nothing would make me happier than to have you home again. But you literally _just_ woke up, Lily. The doctors will need to make sure you're all set to go before they can release you."

"Screw that," I said. "I _need_ to go, right _now_."

"Lily, we can't just snap our fingers and make it happen like that."

"Hey, you two," a handsome blond doctor, somewhere in his thirties, said as he (and his reflections in the mirrors) suddenly showed up in our little cube. He smiled and wrote some information down on a clipboard with a pen. "So you're finally awake. That's good."

"Can I go home now, doctor?" I said, not expecting a positive response. I looked at his name tag so I'd have some idea of who I was talking to, who'd been taking care of me for the last five days.

"Soon enough," Dr. Larson said with a nod.

"How soon?"

"Well, you probably _could_ go home today if you wanted to, but you should _probably_ stay here another day or two so we can make sure you'll be completely all right when you _do_ leave."

"That's not soon enough!" I said.

"Calm down, kid."

"I will _not_ calm down! I have to go home _right now_!"

"Be back soon," the doctor said, ignoring me as he walked away. He passed through the wispy mirror I was seeing around me and disappeared.

"Mom," I said, and it felt weird every time I called my aunt that, "you _have_ to get me out of here! I need to get back to the house!"

"It can wait, Lily."

"I'm _not_ Lily!" I exclaimed, slamming fists, weak from days of no use, down on the bed around my legs. "I'm your niece, _Claire_, and I'm trapped in her body, and she's trapped in mine! This all happened because we went down the trapdoor in the cellar! I think if I go down there again, I might be able to reverse it! …Or maybe it'll make things even worse, I don't know. _Help me!_"

My aunt just stared at me like I was some kind of nut. And if I were in her position, I probably would have done the same. But everyone has that part of the brain that believes the craziest things no matter how insane they might sound, and I hoped that Aunt Sophia's crazy-believer wouldn't be tossed aside, not today.

After a long pause, she said slowly to me, "I _want_ to believe you, but…"

"You know what?" I said defiantly, taking the IV out of my arm and pulling my hospital robe off. "I don't need you!" I turned to make my way off the bed while Sophia, perhaps still registering what I'd just told her, just watched. "I'll just find my _own_ way home!" Walking with a little bit of a limp following the disuse of my limbs, I made my way out of the mirror cube I'd been stuck in, and what do you know, I was able to pass through it just as Dr. Larson had earlier, and when I looked behind me to see how it appeared from the outside, I saw just saw ordinary hospital beds with ordinary, different patients (although my bed was now, of course, empty). I shook my head and uttered a small, rather bitter laugh, only to trip onto the floor I was walking on.

My aunt showed up from behind to help me up, and after doing so, she told me to great, wonderful surprise, "I _do_ believe you, um, _Claire_."

"_Thank you!_" I sighed.

The two of us shared a hug, but we were interrupted in the middle by Dr. Larson.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked.


	13. Chapter 13

"You _had_ to park at the far end of the parking lot, didn't you?"

"Well, excuse me, I didn't think I'd be leaving this hospital _with security on my tail!_"

My aunt and I were about a third of the way through the crowded hospital parking lot, with Dr. Larson and a pair of uniformed security guards chasing after us. ("_Come back here!_") I guess filling out hospital paperwork really _is_ that important.

"_Whoa!_" I shrieked, tripping onto the asphalt due to my limp. "_Ow!_"

As security advanced on us, Aunt Sophia helped me up. "You okay?" she asked me.

"I think I scraped my elbow," I said, showing her the injury I'd received from the fall while foolishly running through a lot where cars could pull in or out at a moment's notice and hurt us even more.

"_We can fix that!_" Dr. Larson offered.

"No, _screw you_!" I shouted back at him. Looking ahead, I saw my aunt's blue sedan, only a short distance away. "_Yes! The car!_ Unlock it!"

A beeping sound, and the two of us rushed inside the vehicle.

"_Start the car! Start the car!_"

"I _know_ what I have to do, Lil—Cla—whoever you are." She turned the key, while I watched through the passenger door mirror the security guards almost upon us. The engine revved up. "_Go!_" I said. I wanted to examine my scrape, but the nature of the situation we were caught in necessitated that I wait a bit before doing that. "_Go!_" I repeated when I saw that the car wasn't moving.

"_Where?_" Aunt Sophia said. "I can't back out of this spot, that'll put us right in the palm of their hand!"

"Then go _forward_!"

"There's a _hill!_ There's no _road_ there! It's just going to take us down to the street below, and I don't think that's a very safe route to take!"

On either side of the car, at both the driver and passenger windows, one of the security guards appeared. The one on my side knocked on the window—with his _gun_—and said, muffled by the glass, "Open the door!"

"_Floor it!_" I said as I buckled up.

Aunt Sophia sighed. "We're going to get hurt."

"There's a hospital _right_ there!" I said, pointing behind me with my right thumb.

"I thought that's what we were running _away_ from!"

"_Just do it!_"

Aunt Sophia pressed on the gas, and off we went.

We bounced along with the car as it made its way up the grassy hill separating the hospital from the road below. I buckled up, but Aunt Sophia had to drive and was unable to secure herself in her seat while she made her way down a route that wasn't supposed to be there. The slope increased our speed quicker than Sophia's foothold on the gas pedal, and pedestrians on the sidewalk below screamed and hurried out of the way as we got closer and closer to them in our dangerous piece of high-speed metal.

"_Hold on,_" Aunt Sophia said. We both gasped as the car prepared to make a jump across the sidewalk and onto the street.

Something crashed behind us as we made contact with the bottom of the hill and then went flying.

I closed my eyes, regretting my decision to leave so early, and listened to the sounds that followed.

The honking of car horns and the shouting of people; the crashing of my aunt's sedan onto the road and the violent shaking that followed; the wail of police sirens and the hiss of steam coming out of the car. I didn't hear Aunt Sophia.

I slowly opened my eyes, trying to hold back tears and the urge to vomit, and looked towards the driver's seat.

I let out a huge sigh when I saw Sophia still there, alive and breathing. "Thank _god_," I said. "Aunt Sophia?"

She was alive, but her hands were stiff, holding on tightly to the steering wheel like a baby and his security blanket. The rest of her body, like mine, was shaking.

A loud honking made me jump. A car zoomed by on my side.

Then another on my aunt's side. And another on mine again.

Suddenly, I was back in reality, and everything was moving fast again.

"…Can you still drive?" I asked.

"_Lily!_" she snapped at me. A tear fell down her cheek.

"I'm sorry," I said. "_I'm sorry_."

"We could've _died_!"

"I know, I was stupid. I shouldn't have dragged you into this, I should've—"

"There's no excuse, Lily."

"I'm not Lily, remember?"

"You're right," Aunt Sophia. "No daughter of mine would ever let something like this happen to our family."

I leaned back against the passenger seat and shut myself up.

For several moments, the two of us sat there in silence. The only thing keeping us sane was the sound of our heartbeats and the small hope that maybe we might someday get out of this whole mess with the trapdoor. But until then, here we were, an aunt and her niece in her daughter's body, sitting in a wrecked vehicle on a busy street somewhere in Norfolk, Virginia, waiting for the inevitable visit from the authorities.

The quiet period ended suddenly with the click of a seatbelt.

I turned to my aunt in shock.

"Time to go," she said.


	14. Chapter 14

Aunt Sophia frantically parked her dirty, heavily dented little sedan in front of the house. Behind us, several threatening police cars—and even a helicopter overhead—continued to follow, and with the obvious exception of the helicopter, the drivers of those vehicles simply resumed their chase on foot.

With my youth and athleticism, I was able to climb over the fence into the backyard pretty easily. My aunt was not so lucky, so I hurriedly unlocked the gate to let her in, thought for a second about closing it and locking it again to slow down the boys in blue, but then decided it wasn't worth it, and instead just kept on running.

Repeated shouts of "_Stop!_" did nothing to stop us. We circled around the house, threw open the cobwebby cellar door, and dived inside. One more door, and then I'd be back in my own body, and hopefully Lily, too. Bunnies in heat would have awed at the speed at which I hopped down those steps towards the trapdoor.

"_So this is it?_" Aunt Sophia said breathlessly as I opened the trapdoor. It almost seemed to exhale when I finally exposed it to the musty air for the first time in days. "_This is the trapdoor?_"

"_Yeah!_" I said. I gripped the sides of the square doorway leading into the ground and was about to dive back in, but then I heard the gun being pulled on us.

"_Stop,_" he said. This time it worked. I looked up and saw a middle-aged mustached police officer walking down the steps to join us. "_Don't move_. _Either_ of you." Several of his comrades were not far behind him.

My aunt raised her arms in surrender. I groaned.

"I'm twelve years old!" I said, looking at the pistol he was aiming at us. "You can't shoot me!"

"I don't want to shoot anyone," he said. "But after the mess you two made in the city today, I think it's safe to say you're both _wildly_ unpredictable."

"She made me do it," Aunt Sophia said.

"You _fink_!" I argued. "You _agreed_ to it!"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"Don't you want your daughter back?!"

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?!" the officer said. "Aren't _you_ her daughter? Aren't _you_ Lily Armstrong?"

"Only in body. Now if you'd just let me go down this trapdoor—"

"No can do, Lily."

"My name is Claire."

"She's my niece," Aunt Sophia clarified, if you'll pardon the pun. "And she can take care of herself," she said as she turned to me. "Can't you, Claire?"

I was confused. "What are you…?"

"Let her go," Aunt Sophia said to the officer. "Take _me_ in. I'll take the heat for this."

"_Aunt Sophia!_"

"Do you have a better suggestion?" she said. It was meant as a rhetorical question, but it didn't stay that way.

She had a point, but _I_ had a trapdoor.

"_Follow me!_" I said quickly, and I jumped down into the trapdoor.

As before, I found myself standing in a hole just deep enough for me to still keep the uppermost tier of my body above ground.

"_Aunt Sophia!_" I shouted.

"I'm right here!" she replied.

"Get out of there," the annoyed police officer said.

"Come down here and close the door on us!" I told my aunt.

"Come on, stop horsing around. Get out of there. There's nowhere else you can go."

"Oh yes there _is_!" I said in defiance of the officer and the reality he was used to. "_Come on!_" I begged my aunt. "You're _not_ going to jail for us, Aunt Sophia!"

Aunt Sophia sighed and scooted over to join me under the trapdoor.

"What are you _waiting_ for?" another police officer said. "You've _got_ them! _Arrest_ them!"

"In a minute," the first officer said, turning back to look briefly at his colleague. With a small laugh, he explained, "There's nowhere they can go from here. Let's just see what happens."

"This is squishy," Aunt Sophia said.

"I don't think it's meant for two people," I said. I looked up one more time at the police officers waiting to arrest us, then grinned and waved goodbye. "Bye," I said, and I closed the trapdoor over my aunt and I.


	15. Chapter 15

A second later, I was blinded by a bright, white light. The trapdoor I closed above us turned into what seemed to be a clear lid over a transparent box that was just large enough to enclose my body inside. Obviously, Aunt Sophia had been transported someplace else—but where?

This question didn't remain unanswered for long. In another transparent box across from me, I saw Sophia. Then, to great surprise, I saw yet another one about equidistant from the both of our boxes, and this third box had Lily inside. Lily—in her _own_ body; I looked down and let out a huge sigh; happy to finally be back in the body I belonged.

Of course, being trapped in a box put an end to this momentary victory. I pounded on the wall of the box—it felt like glass—catching my relatives' attention, but when I tried calling their names, I could feel the noise simply reverberating back to me, not once leaving the box. Their body language indicated that they could see me, too, and were trying to call me, but were having just as much success as I was in this regard.

Taking another look at the boxes Aunt Sophia and Lily were stuck inside, I saw one clear, plastic-looking tube coming down into each of the boxes from a ceiling rather high up above us. I turned to my right and glanced upward, and a circular opening from a similar tube ended there, just as I had suspected. I really had no idea what these tubes could be for, but I guessed they were there to provide us with air to breathe.

But why we were in these otherwise suffocating boxes, I couldn't fathom.

When I looked down, outside the boxes, I saw a network of cold gray metal piping running all through the floor of the room, with parts of the network surfacing at the bottom of our boxes, just beneath our feet. I didn't know what these pipes were for either, but something told me I didn't want to find out.

Unable to say a word to my aunt and cousin, I decided I had no other choice but to try and find a way out of the box. I reached up and pushed as hard as I could to open the lid that had closed down on me a minute ago. I pushed and pushed for almost thirty seconds, but when I glanced up and saw Lily dancing around in her box, trying to avoid fast-moving flames rising up out of the pipes under her, I quickly stopped.

Lily's skin had reddened from the heat she'd avoided, and the sweat her body had produced in response. The deep breaths she took to return to normal were made more difficult by the limited space she had in which to breathe.

In stark contrast to Lily's recent episode, I was suddenly splashed with water from above. When I looked up to see from where it had come, I noticed the plastic tube was dripping.

I turned to look at Aunt Sophia, and when she next pushed up on the lid of _her_ box, more water burst through the tube down into _my_ box. Now standing in a few inches of water—that were rapidly becoming _more_ than just a few—I turned back to Lily, then kept my eyes on her as I pushed up on the lid of _my_ box; the flames returned to _her_ box.

I immediately stopped pushing, lest I burn Lily to death.

My aunt was focused on trying to get out of her box, and because she hadn't been paying attention to either of us, her actions continued to cause water to pour into my box. It was nearly up to my knees now, and would soon surpass them.

While I pounded on my box to get Aunt Sophia to stop, Lily reasoned it was time to see what happened if she tried to open her box, and _that_ stopped Aunt Sophia, causing a jolt of electricity in her box.

The three of us looked at each other and realized our situation: if any of us attempted to get out, one of the others would suffer for it, and probably soon _die_ for it, be it by drowning, burning, or electrocution. It was an impossible dilemma.

But it was also our only option.

We took one last long look at one another, expressed our understanding through our teary eyes, and prepared to race against certain death.

I reached up and pushed.


	16. Chapter 16

Blackness.

I could hear shouting, but it was rather quiet and muffled.

Steadily, the black turned to gray, then the gray to white.

The voices became louder as the colors became clearer.

Sight and sound were quickly joined by touch, when I suddenly felt a pounding on my chest, squarely at my heart; then lips on my mouth, and air being blown inside.

With a cough, I finally came to. Water dripped out of my mouth, and down to my clothes, which like the rest of me were completely soaked.

"_She's alive!_"

I recognized that voice. It was the police officer that had pointed his gun at my aunt and me before we'd _stupidly_ decided to go down the trapdoor. That damn trapdoor.

I coughed again, and rose up, weary and still only semi-conscious, to get a sense of my surroundings.

"Are you okay, kid?" the officer asked, putting his hand on my wet shoulder. "Can you hear me? What's your name?"

"Claire," I said. "We've met."

"No, I met your cousin and your aunt. Lily and Sophia."

I glanced down and realized, happily, that I was _finally_ back in my own body.

But, like anything involving the trapdoor, this was a short-lived celebration.

"Where—where are they?" I said desperately, trying unsuccessfully to get to my feet. "Where am _I_?"

"They're right behind me," the officer said, causing me to take a look at them being helped by his fellow officers. Or at least I tried to look, until he stopped me with his hand. "Now, listen carefully, Claire. I don't think you should be looking at them right now."

"_Why not?_" I shrieked.

"They've been severely burned."

"_Lily!_" I shouted, again failing in my attempt to stand up. "_Aunt Sophia!_"

"Do you know how this happened?" he asked me.

"_Screw you!_" I said tearfully. "Let me _talk_ to them, let me see them!"

"They're barely conscious, Claire. They're lucky to even be _alive_. And so are _you_. You almost drowned!"

"And you saved me."

"Your aunt and cousin went down that trapdoor," the officer said with a slight glance to the door in the floor behind him. "And disappeared. Until a couple minutes ago, when all _three_ of you reappeared here in this cellar—out of thin air, you just…_appeared_."

"…I should be _dead_," I realized.

"But you're _not_, Claire."

"_I'm _not, but what about _them?_" I said, at last able to stand up and see the condition they were in.

The brief second I got turned out to be too much time. When I saw their moaning bodies, spotted with dark, discolored burns, like the scab from a fall multiplied a hundred, two hundred times, I screamed and quickly turned around, nearly vomited in the process, and collapsed onto my knees and cried. "_I'm sorry,_" I whispered, to no one in particular.

"It's okay, Claire," the officer said, placing hands he thought would comfort me on both of my shoulders. "We've called an ambulance, they should be here any minute. We'll do everything we can to make sure they…well…"

"_Don't die?_" I growled at him.

"Well…yes."

"I'm sorry," I repeated with a sigh. "I know you're just doing your job…I know we led you on a wild chase through the city and everything…"

"That wasn't you, that was Lil—"

"It _was_ me!" I said. "I _told_ you, I was in Lily's body!"

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry."

I sniffed and said, "This is my fault."

As the loud siren of the ambulance arriving outside died down, I listened to the paramedics assist the police officers with Lily and Aunt Sophia. While they did this, I cried for a few minutes more and just let the officer whose name I didn't even know do his best to make me feel better.

To my great surprise, it was only after those several minutes had passed that I at long last understood what had to be done. The trapdoor, the source of all this evil and torture, had to be destroyed.


	17. Chapter 17

"Kid, you can't stay here," the officer said, and I watched as his shadow loomed over my body and onto the wall in front of me. "Not with your aunt and your cousin in the hospital. You're going to have to come with us."

"Do you have any matches?" I said, standing up and turning around to face him and his colleagues. "Do _any_ of you have any? Or a lighter?"

"No," the officer said, rightfully confused. "And even if we did, do you really think we'd give them to you? Why do you even need them?"

"Why do you think?" I said. I briefly turned to look at the trapdoor, and so did the officer. "I want to destroy it."

"The trapdoor?"

"Yeah, the trapdoor."

"It's just a piece of wood over a hole in the floor, Claire. There's really not much you can do."

"I say it's worth a shot."

"And _I_ say no, you're leaving this place just like the rest of us."

"Make me," I said, crossing my arms to tell him I was serious but feeling stupid just the same.

The officer grabbed one of my arms and began forcibly moving me along towards the cellar door. I tried to resist, but him being a grown man with likely years of training and me being a prepubescent girl with only some athletic prowess, I was easily overpowered. I shouted at him to let me go, but of course I was ignored. I kicked, I pounded on his arm, I grabbed onto items in the yard or on the house in attempts to weigh myself down, all in all acting very immature and hurting my chances of cooperation with these men in the future.

As the ambulance loaded my aching relatives inside, I was motioned into the back seat of a patrol car, and told that I was going to be dropped off at the hospital to be with my family. That's exactly what happened.

* * *

"Just go up to the front desk," the officer driving the patrol car told me as we pulled up to the very same hospital my aunt and I had made a high-octane escape from earlier. He unlocked the back door and finished, "Tell them who you're here for, and they'll show you the way," which was all pretty obvious information. I thanked him anyway and closed the door to walk to the hospital entrance.

While the police car was driving away and I was approaching the double doors at the front of the hospital, I heard "Afternoon Delight" blasting from the radio of a car leaving the parking lot. This was enough to make me stop in my tracks just before pulling the handle to open one of the doors. Last time I'd heard that song, I was in an alternate universe, in an alternate body. How did I know that wasn't the case now? What if I opened that door and I ended up not inside a hospital, but someplace entirely different, because I was still under the control of the trapdoor? And if _that_ were the case, what would happen to Aunt Sophia and Lily?

I then made another revelation: every time I'd faced certain death under the trapdoor, I'd somehow been saved. I'd woken up safe in bed (albeit in Lily's body) or back in the cellar with the police officers, not dead. _Why?_

Why didn't I ever die when I was under the trapdoor? Had Lily experienced this, too? Was I invincible? I could already get away with a crime if I wanted to, did that mean I could survive anything, too? If _I_ couldn't die, did that mean Sophia and Lily couldn't, either? Did that mean they were safe? No matter what happened, _we were safe_?

"Can I help you?" a man in a white coat said after exiting the building. "Miss?"

"Um…" I began, but all this thinking had made me feeling numb with power. "No," I said, and so I took a chance and opened the hospital door.

* * *

Within a second of the door closing behind me, the crowded hospital disappeared in a flash of white light and I was back in the cellar. I was alone, with not a trace of the police or paramedics in sight. The afternoon sun shined in through the open cellar door. Glancing to the side, I saw the trapdoor resting on the floor, and it seemed to be staring back at me, silently mocking my failure to do anything about the situation it had me trapped in.

But not for long.

I rushed out of the cellar and over to the back door of the house. Amazingly, it was still unlocked, but then again, the key bearers were in the hospital right now and didn't have the means to—

"_Claire?_" my aunt said, almost giving me a heart attack when I saw her standing in the kitchen. She had just pulled a water bottle out of the refrigerator, and after taking a sip, she called out to her daughter. "Hey, Lily, look who's here!" Naturally, she was more shocked than excited to see me, as I was with her. "_Lily!_"

"I heard you, Mom," Lily said as she appeared from around a corner. "So, what's up?" she asked me. Their nonchalance about all this only made it even more frightening.

"Shouldn't…shouldn't you be in the hospital right now?" I said.

"Shouldn't _you_ be in California right now?" Aunt Sophia replied.

"No, listen! You were covered in burns! Both of you! It was horrible!"

"Burns from what?" Lily asked.

"_The trapdoor!_"

"The trapdoor?"

"Yes, the one in the cellar! I just climbed out of it!"

"Is this one of those 'dig a hole to China' things, only you decided to dig to Virginia instead?"

"You're not _listening_!"

Aunt Sophia put a hand on my forehead. "Are you feeling okay, Claire?" she said.

"No, I'm _not_ feeling okay! I don't know what to think, I don't know what to _believe_! None of this makes any sense!"

"You're right, it doesn't. I'm going to call your parents. Do they know you're here?"

"The _hell_ if I know," I said, taking a seat at a chair beside the kitchen table. Lily joined me on the adjacent seat and rubbed my back as though it were some sort of comfort.

"Are they home?" Aunt Sophia said, strangely _after_ she dialed our number.

After a minute of absorbing this discontinuity in, I sighed and remembered what I'd originally come in here to do. "Can I have some matches?" I asked.

"There's no answer."

"_Screw it,_" I said, and just as soon as I'd sat down, I walked over to the drawers under the counter to search for anything I could use to start a small fire. I found a box of matches, snatched them in my hand, and ran back outside to the trapdoor whence I'd came.


	18. Chapter 18

As soon as I reached the cellar floor, my curious aunt and cousin following close behind, I bent down onto my knees. I opened the trapdoor without crawling inside, lit one of the matches, saw my relatives staring back at me behind the flame, and finally placed the fire to the wood. Slowly, the rusty brown of the door turned a scorching black, and I backed away to join Aunt Sophia and Lily. The door burned and burned and just kept on burning, not a single crackle of the fire leaving the small wooden block, and I smiled with relief. "It's over," I said to my confused family. "_It's over_."

I had to be sure that what I was doing would work, so I stuck around to watch the damn door die while the two of them walked back inside to, as Sophia told me before they left, "try your parents again." I told her to take her time.

All finally seemed right with the world. My presence back here in Norfolk was something of a mystery, but aside from that, Sophia and Lily were safe, my parents were reconciling (which probably explained the phone going to the machine), and the trapdoor would never harm another living soul. I tried acting humble, but I couldn't help but grin and very nearly avoided bouncing up and down with glee. You would too if you'd just been through what I had. What _hell_.

* * *

_Wednesday, July 21, 2004_

I had finally relaxed after a week of hellish experiences when I was awoken in the middle of the night, as before, by a sudden draft. What I saw when I opened my eyes, however, wasn't the guest bedroom I'd fallen asleep in. Instead I saw nothing but blackness.

At first I thought it was just the light playing tricks with me, but when, after a minute, my eyes didn't seem to adjust and the faint outlines of windows and furniture didn't appear, I really started to get scared. All I could see was the bed I was laying in, and even that was being steadily enveloped by the blackness. I quickly pulled my feet in to roll myself into a secure-feeling ball, but unfortunately, the security was only that, a feeling.

"_Lily?_" I said. I wanted to scream for her attention, but I was too frightened for my vocal chords to make an impression, and all that came out was a faint whisper. "_Aunt Sophia?_"

I couldn't even see the door to the guest bedroom, so I wondered what good my calls could possibly do. Wherever I was, I was alone there. And in a matter of time, I would be somewhere else; I didn't know where, but the blackness creeping towards me would be my transport. I closed my eyes and decided to just let it happen.

Wait a minute. Is this how I really wanted to go? Cowering in bed? _No_, I quickly decided. If I was going to lose my life, I wasn't going to let some punk force of darkness take it and all the glory of victory along with it. I was going to _jump right in_. Let them put that in my obituary: Claire Zielinkski didn't die like a wimp.

I took one look at the blackness surrounding me, and did exactly what a wimp wouldn't do: kick the punk where it hurts. A second, a blink, I was gone.


	19. Chapter 19

I awoke gasping for breath, back in the same guest bed I'd been sleeping in. There was no warning—one minute I existed, then the next I didn't, and now here I was again. As I took deep breaths to calm myself down before making any movements out of the bed, I tried to comprehend just what the hell was going on.

I couldn't do that.

Carefully, I set my feet down on the soft carpet and walked over to Lily's room to find her. She wasn't there. Nor was Aunt Sophia when I tried looking for her. Both her sedan and Uncle Bruce's truck were parked in the driveway, and yet no one was home.

I ran outside and over to the neighbor's house—someone I didn't even know—just to try to find someone to talk to. After repeated knocks, each one more loud and frantic than the one before it, and one desperate kick, the door finally opened. Along with a ear-shattering burglar alarm. Still no one answered.

I ran down to the next house, hoping for more luck.

You can probably guess my results.

After hurrying back to my relatives' house, I picked up the kitchen phone to call someone—_anyone_. The device was fully connected, but I didn't even get so much as a dial tone when I picked up that receiver. I hung up and lifted up the receiver one more time, hoping there had just been some sort of glitch, but of course there were no glitches. I slammed the phone back down, nearly breaking it in my anger.

I turned on the TV in the living room. Static.

The newspaper on the coffee table was dated yesterday: Tuesday, July 20, 2004. A quick trip back outside revealed no paper for today, nor, when I checked the mailbox, any mail.

At this point, I knew I was alone. Everyone else had just vanished into thin air.

I walked over to the backyard, opened the cellar door, turned on the light…and saw a fully intact trapdoor on the floor. I screamed with a mix of fury, sorrow, and horror, with the echo of my outburst providing the only human contact I might ever have again.


	20. Chapter 20

With all the strength I could muster, which seemed to decrease steadily as the stress of what I was going through continued to take its toll, I tore the trapdoor off its hinges and threw it down onto the ground. I stomped on it repeatedly, I don't how many times, and of course I still caused little damage to the door.

I picked up the door and carried it into the empty house, tossed it onto the kitchen counter, and then pulled out the matches from the drawer like I had done the day before. Even knowing the door would simply restore itself afterward, I persisted in destroying it just like I had yesterday, setting fire to the wooden square and then stepping back while the flames began to engulf the door, then the kitchen, and soon the rest of the house.

I hurried to the cellar for safety, shut the door leading inside, and cried myself to sleep in the darkness while the sound of flames roared, unseen above me.

* * *

When I awoke, my cheek was wet from lying in a puddle beneath my face. Light shined in through the cracks between the cellar door and the outside; it was a pleasant yellow-white, a sign that what waited for me when I opened that door wasn't scorching fire but a quiet afternoon in the South. After stepping out into the yard, I turned to look at the house I'd escaped from as it succumbed to the fire I'd started.

Somehow, the house was still standing. I'd heard the fire, I'd seen it, I'd felt its heat around me…and yet here was an untouched building.

"What?"

That was all I could say before I felt a sudden but powerful gust of wind. The ground beneath me swayed in a wavelike motion, and I nearly fell backwards onto the grass.

Then the house was swallowed into nothingness. Just like that. No warning.

Barely a second afterward, my world went black again.

* * *

Water slammed onto my face, as cold and sharp as icicles.

I crashed into the sea without actually falling. I was just _there_.

Stormy weather was all around me, and I rolled with the monstrous waves up and down, in one crest and out the other, while thunder and lightning tore up the black clouds overhead. I was absolutely soaked, wearing nothing beyond a T-shirt and jeans, and I could hardly see a thing due to the constant motion. Nausea swiftly overtook me, but I didn't even have time to vomit, not in these circumstances.

When I heard a boisterous rumbling sound above me, at first I thought it was just the thunder. But when I looked up—as well as I possibly could in my situation—I realized it wasn't the thunder at all. I was wrong, and if I didn't move out the way quickly, I'd be dead, too.

My aunt and uncle's house was crumbling into pieces as it fell through the air.

Pieces as small as insects and as massive as refrigerators fell into the ocean all around me. I did what I could to dodge them, but the waves and the nausea they were giving me slowed me down considerably, and I gasped for breath as the threat of drowning was compounded by a danger of being killed instantly by one oversized piece of debris.

What remained of the house at last hit water, causing a series of gigantic ripples as it made contact some twenty feet away from me and sent dozens more pieces flying. The contents of the building, everything from the clothes in Lily's dresser to the utensils in the kitchen to the decorations set up by the family, floated beside me. Only after this was all over did I finally feel the splinters digging into all parts of my skin and see the blood seeping out of the holes they'd caused. I wanted to scream and curse, but I was almost too numb to even think about doing that.

I thought the worst was over, at least for _this_ particular nightmare chosen by the trapdoor, but no, of course it wasn't. It seemed like maybe a minute or two afterward, but in reality it was probably only thirty seconds since the crashing of the house when the two trees on the property, one in front and the other in the back yard, both over forty feet tall at the least, appeared rocketing downward from the clouds. The first tree landed roughly where the house had, tearing apart the few remaining large segments as it impaled them with its trunk, but the other one pretty much landed directly on top of _me_.

I screamed, but only for a second, because halfway through I was pushed several yards completely underwater. Unprepared, in my last microseconds of clarity I could see loose leaves dotting the surface above me before cold water shot into my eyeballs, forcing me to close them, which didn't stop the pain at all, and into my mouth, too much and too late for me to continue breathing. With the water now in my lungs, I knew I only had a short amount of time. I struggled to swim to the surface, but in all the agony I was enduring and with all the continually moving debris, I could barely make it a few feet before my body slowed and slowed and slowed until it stopped.

I found myself in peace in those last few moments. The cold turned to warmth, the movements seemed gentler, and the debris became less threatening. The only thing I could hear was the beating of my heart, which was slowly ceasing to nothing.

The last thing I saw before my heart stopped was a small wooden door drifting past.


	21. Chapter 21

_Thursday, July 22, 2004_

With no explanation, I awoke to the same sound that had heralded my death: my heartbeat. I was back in the guest bedroom, in the same pajamas I'd brought with me from home. My suitcase was in the same place I'd left it, and after jumping out of bed and unlocking the bag, all my belongings were inside, just as I'd left them. Looking at the clock on the wall, I saw that it was almost two in the morning, so it was the next day, whatever that happened to be.

I hurried across the hall to Lily's room, and sighed with relief when I saw that she was sleeping soundly in her bed—and in her body, not someone else's. I did the same with Aunt Sophia, and finally myself with a brief check in the bathroom mirror. All seemed normal, but I couldn't help thinking something _had_ to be off. Ever since I'd gone down the trapdoor, something had _always_ been off upon my return. In a sense, I'd never returned at all.

Upon seeing things this way, I had another epiphany, and slapped myself (painfully) on the forehead. I wasn't expecting such an action to knock any more sense into the situation, much less myself (because really, who slaps themselves on the forehead), but it must have done just that. In my second straight epiphany, I realized that, if I'd never returned, maybe none of this was really happening. Maybe I was caught in a nightmare I couldn't get out of, which begged the question, at which point did I fall asleep and let my imagination take over? If this _was_ the explanation, then there had to be a simple enough solution, a quick and easy route back to reality.

At first I thought about killing myself, based on the observation of not actually hitting the ground and dying when dreaming about falling. But I quickly reconsidered upon remembering that I'd died several times already and had only found myself in arguably worse circumstances afterward. Since I was no expert, the only easy out I could conceive of to escape from a bad dream was also ruled out. And that logic circled me around to the possibility that maybe this _wasn't_ a dream after all.

None of what was happening was making the slightest bit of sense. I was just hopping from one messed-up reality to the next, with no consistent vessel from one to the other. If I had the tiniest clue how to fight this thing, I'd jump at it.

Exhausted from what I'd been through and continually _thinking_ about what I'd been through, I wasn't even able to return to the guest bedroom before falling asleep again. I set myself down on the recliner in the living room, grabbed a blanket from the nearby sofa and threw it over me, pulled the lever on the side to lift my feet up, and sighed happily as I drifted back to sleep.

* * *

"_Wake up, Claire!_"

I groaned, recognizing Lily's voice but ignoring it, pulling the blanket over my head.

She pulled the blanket off me, and my hands were left hanging in mid-air, and that awkward feeling, along with the chill creeping over me, was what finally made me open my eyes and look at my cousin, who was already fully dressed.

"Good morning to you, too, Lily," I grumbled.

As I wiped my eyes with my fists, she told me, "Seriously, of all the days to sleep in, you chose _this_ one?"

"It's _summer vacation_," I said, rising up out of the chair. "Every _day_ is a day to sleep in."

"And normally, I'd agree with you. School can suck it. But that plane you have to catch _can't_."

"Plane?"

"Don't you remember?" Lily said. "You're going home today, Claire!"

She didn't have to tell me twice. I ran out of the living room and back to the guest room, and began quickly picking out clothes to wear from the suitcase.

"This is so unfair!" I remarked.

Appearing in the doorway and watching me from there, Lily added, "Well, I'm flattered that you like us so much."

"It's not that. That's not it _at all_."

"_Bitch_," Lily said, actually causing me to stop my rushing and turn my heads toward her. "Sorry. You do still like us, right?"

"_Duh!_ I'm talking about the _trapdoor_, Lily! _God!_"

"Someone's touchy this morning. Maybe you should have some breakfast first."

"_I'm_ touchy? _You're_ the one who assumed I was talking about you guys! Don't you know what they say about people who assume?"

"Can we forget about that? You mentioned the trapdoor."

"I can't _believe_ you ever showed me that horrible thing."

"After seeing _that_, I think it would make sense for everything else on this trip to be underwhelming for you."

"_Underwhelming?_" I scoffed, throwing the clothes I'd picked down onto the floor in anger. "I barely got to experience _anything_ besides that trapdoor! Thanks to _you_, Lily, I've been put through hell, I mean literally, _hell_ my entire time here! You're telling me I spent an entire week here with you? That's a _lie_!"

"_Don't call me a liar!_" Lily snapped. "You _were_ here, Claire!"

"Then why don't I _remember_ any of it?"

"You know what? I'm starting to think you really _don't_ like us."

"Of course I like you! I _love _you! You guys are _family_!"

"If that's how you feel, then why are you trying to blame your boredom this week on a trapdoor you only went down, what, three or four times?"

"That is _not_ all that happened."

"That's how _we_ remember it. My Mom and I."

"What's going on?" Aunt Sophia said as she appeared from behind Lily. "What are you two fussing about?"

"I think Claire should see a doctor when she gets back home," Lily said, an opinion that I wasn't finding helpful in the least. "I think she's suffering from some kind of memory loss."

"I'm _not_!" I growled. "Aunt Sophia, I'm _fine_! It's _you guys_ who are messed up!"

"Such kind parting words," Lily remarked to her mother.

"I'm sorry," I said. "But you have to believe me: something's wrong here. Something's _very _wrong. I went down the trapdoor last week, and…I'm starting to think I never really came back out."

"So…what?" Lily shrugged. "We're just figments of your imagination now?"

"I sure hope not," I gulped.

"We're real, Claire," Aunt Sophia tried to reassure me.

"But how can you be _sure_? How can _any_ of us be sure?"

"You're just going to have to trust me. You should be getting ready. Finish packing and then wash up. Or, maybe do the reverse; that might make more sense. Your flight leaves in just a couple hours."

As she walked away from Lily and I, I realized that she had a point. Things seemed to be going great—there was no reason to lay undue stress on myself by fretting over things that might not even be true.

Of course, you know what they say about people who assume.


	22. Chapter 22

I took my seat at the back end of the plane, at a window seat not far behind the left wing. My attempt to immediately lay back and go back to sleep was delayed when I heard the somewhat muffled sound of music emanating from the headphones of the iPod belonging to the teenage boy sitting next to me. With a sigh, I turned to him and asked, "Are you listening to _Nickelback_?"

"Uh huh," he replied with a nod, turning down the volume to better hear me but not enough that I could better _not_ hear his music. "Why?"

I sighed as I closed my eyes. "This is going to be a _long_ flight."

I buckled my seatbelt and made myself comfortable. Slowly, I fell asleep as my neighbor quietly sung to himself: "_Something's gotta go wrong because I'm feeling way too damn good…_"

* * *

My dream about hanging out with Holly was suddenly and violently interrupted by an earthquake, and I woke up shortly thereafter to discover that we were caught in turbulence. Through my window, I saw that we had left the clear, sunny weather of Virginia behind, as a thunderstorm roared outside my window. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was about one in the afternoon, so I must have been about halfway home, meaning that we were probably flying somewhere over Oklahoma or Kansas right now. It was summer, and that meant tornado season.

"How much longer should this last?" I asked a stewardess walking by.

"Not too much longer," she replied with a fake smile. "We should be leaving the storm soon."

The boy sitting between the stewardess and I was safe in his own world, listening to his iPod. I envied him, not for his Nickelback fandom, which he could keep, but for his ability to ignore the unpredictable shaking going on around us. This envy didn't last long, though, because even in this noise, my ears soon caught a sample of what he was listening to: "Afternoon Delight."

I grabbed the cords of the headphones and quickly pulled them out of his ears.

"_Ow!_" he said as he turned in my direction. Taking the headphones back, he said, "What the hell is your problem?"

I knew I'd been rude, but the fact that he knew nothing of that song's unfortunate associations for me lately didn't excuse my actions. "Sorry," I said, only half meaning it. "But you can't listen to that song. Not as long as I'm here."

"First Nickelback," he grumbled, "and now Starland Vocal Band. What else can't I listen to, huh?"

"I don't care," I said. "Just…_anything_ but them."

He continued to argue with me about this, but I heard none of it because I was distracted by the wobbling of the plane. This wasn't ordinary turbulence; what I felt was more like a sound wave, which made itself visible through the unnatural bending of solid objects. The metal armrest between the boy and I; the chair I was sitting on; the reinforced glass window; the fuselage protecting us—for a few short seconds, they bent, the wave traveling backwards through the plane.

I turned to the boy again, terrified, and said, "Did you feel that?"

"What?" he said, apparently meaning he hadn't.

That was the last thing I heard before another mysterious wave struck the plane, this one silencing the plane. I couldn't hear anything—not the boy I'd been talking to, whose mouth was moving without a sound coming out, not the other people onboard, not the engines being shook around by the storm going on outside. This lasted for a second, and then sound was restored—news that I received through the deafening explosion of one of the engines.

Everyone onboard screamed as the plane made a sudden swerve down and to the left. Yellow oxygen masks popped out from above our seats, and while I was quick to cup mine over my mouth, the fiery explosion of another engine, this one from the opposite wing, soon negated whatever respite the mask may have provided.

Several hundred people continued to scream. Several babies and children were crying loudly. One food cart and then another lost control and slid its way down the aisle between the seats as the plane spun in circles, on a downward spiral through the clouds. The lights flickered on and off. A few of the overhead bins burst open, sending heavy packages crashing down onto the heads of the people below.

Just when we thought things couldn't get any worse, there was a loud _pop_ as the cockpit was suddenly stripped of the layers of metal and glass protecting it. The plane began to fall apart. There was more screaming as we became exposed to the cold air, wind and rain, and the sharp pieces of broken fuselage being thrown around in it.

I lowered my head and wrapped my arms around it in a tearful attempt to lock myself in a sort of shell between my seat and the one in front of mine, but this became nearly impossible to do as flying pieces of metal cut my skin and the string that had been keeping the oxygen flowing my way. In my terror, I was unable to close my eyes and avoid the sight of the fuselage being disassembled, of row after row of seats coming apart as the destruction headed ever closer to me.

Within a minute, probably less, it was done.

I found myself falling through the open air, with thousands of other bits and pieces of the plane and its passengers on all sides. My seatbelt was still buckled, meaning I was still gripping tightly to the armrests on either side of me, in some futile hope they would save my rapidly shortening life.

Before I knew it, I'd hit the ground.

The metal buckle snapped apart, taking some of the surrounding cloth along with it, and inevitably the entire chair split in two, sending me tearing through a wheat field in a momentary feeling of speed and power. My limbs broken, my neck all but snapped, the last thing I saw in the seconds before my eyes closed completely, as I looked skyward past the sun shining from the side of me and instead at the base of the clouds directly above, was a hundred tiny specks calling for help around the smoky, dwindling wreck of what used to be a plane.


	23. Chapter 23

I awoke gasping for breath, and put my hand on my chest upon feeling how strongly my heart was pounding inside it. This affirmation that I was alive was further helped by the sight I caught immediately afterward of another jet parked outside, and the airport personnel driving one of those luggage carts around, and the unseen roar of other jets passing by overhead.

A loud beeping sound startled me, but the voice that followed didn't. "Welcome to Los Angeles," a stewardess said, as dozens of passengers, including the boy sitting next to me, all unbuckled their seatbelts in unison.

"It was all a dream," I said out loud, primarily to myself.

"Yeah," the boy replied. "Sleeping tends to do that to people."

"The plane didn't crash. We're all still alive."

"I probably would've remembered if we weren't."

"I'm not talking to you."

"If that means I can listen to all the Nickelback I want, I'm okay with that."

The two of us begrudgingly made peace as we waited for our row to be cued to leave the plane, and on the way out to the terminal I sighed and smiled as the warm sun of California, of home, shined down onto me through windows and vents. Upon arriving at the baggage claim area, my joy was doubled when I saw that my parents weren't the only ones waiting for me there; Holly was with them, too. It was hard for me to decide whom to hug first, but someone had to get the shorter end of the stick, and it ended up being Mom and Dad.

"No offense," I remarked to them while my arms were wrapped around Holly. "I mean, I see you every day, right?"

"Not me," Dad said. The bright blue NASA logo on the breast of his shirt served as a flashy reminder of the astronaut studliness that had ended up being the undoing of their marriage and thus the catalyst of our separation across states.

I hugged Dad next to make up for this slight, and then Mom last.

"You have _no_ idea what I've been through this past week," I told them as we began walking to the conveyer belt to pick up my suitcase.

"You gained psychic powers," Holly replied. Mom and Dad did a double take when they heard this. "Well, it sure seemed that way when we talked on the phone."

"How's that bruise doing?" I asked.

As she bended her arm to look at said bruise, Holly said, "Bruisy."

"And how's that reconciliation going?" I continued, this time directing my question towards Mom and Dad, who cleared their throats a little. "Am I coming home to a clean house, or should I start panicking?"

"You can always move in with me," Holly said.

"Nothing's changed, Claire," Mom answered. "Wally's going back to Houston soon, and won't be back again until Thanksgiving, as always."

I suddenly spotted my suitcase moving on the conveyer belt, and rushed to grab it while Mom continued talking.

"I know you want us to get back together, and sometimes we'd like that, too, but the fact of the matter is, it's probably never going to happen."

"At least you two still _see_ each other occasionally," Holly said. "I've still yet to have an experience where my Mom and Dad even _talk_ to each other that didn't turn out to be a dream."

"I thought you and Mark hated Pam," Dad said, as we left the baggage claim and stepped outside on our way to the parking lot. "And I mean _hated_."

"We do," Holly said. "And she deserves whatever she has coming to her."

"Considering this is _Pam_ we're talking about," Dad muttered under his breath, mostly to Mom but still just loud enough for Holly and I hear, "she probably has a _lot_ coming to her…" Mom nudged him in the side to shut him up, but the doubling of his entendre was not lost on us: we were twelve. We'd seen and heard worse things, after all—in my case, unimaginably worse things.

While we waited for the light to change so we could cross the street, I watched the cars and shuttles zooming by, and having lived through that escape from the hospital and subsequently the cops, I found myself reliving in my head the horror of the ordeal. I'd learned that a vehicle enclosed in metal casing traveling at several tens of miles per hour could protect you, or kill you, depending on the circumstances.

"But if I could go back in time and change things," Holly said just as the light changed from red to green, signaling us to cross, "I would."


End file.
